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windupwolf

@windupwolf

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** spoilers ahead

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski is one of the most perfectly constructed novels I’ve read, insofar as how it follows through on a theory of writing in which it seems that every word has a purpose in the text; that it is simultaneously broad in its ambitions and, for a 340-page novel, seems to provide plenty of breathing room within its plot, but is also incredibly precise and devastatingly pressurized in its reading experience.

There is a deep vein of irony and double-meaning symbols and narrative parallels that occur throughout the text that are just hidden enough that they can be missed at any turn, but are clear enough that they are undeniably in service of Kempowski’s thematic buildup.

The central technique at the center of the novel is its lengthy buildup to its climax, which occurs within the last 10% of the relatively long novel. And it’s fascinating for a number of reasons. The buildup itself is filled with quiet moments of daily life on an aristocratic German estate in January of 1945, when the reader understands what is about to happen to the characters in the novel with the invading Russian forces. But the complacent upper-class German citizenry depicted in the story only feel an inappropriately story-esque or fictional sense of danger.

That naivete is shattered in the last 10% of the novel, but that buildup is fascinating because, for one, it shows Kempowski’s control, in which he is comfortable writing for hundreds of pages about seemingly mundane, benign events and interactions between travelers and a fairly typical family. There’s nothing very noteworthy about them at face value. And the reader still feels this forward pressure despite it not being explicitly drawn out for them, which is a huge credit to Kempowski’s technique. (Continued in comments) #nyrbsummer @nyrbooks by @windupwolf

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22 days ago

**spoilers ahead

I am tempted to talk more about what The Strudlhof Steps by Doderer is rather than what it means. Part of that is definitely due to the text’s length, density, and, in some ways, complexity. But in other ways, it’s just because I found it to be such an unusual novel.

It is a very long novel. It’s 840 pages, but there are no chapters, so there is very little white space. And by almost any standard, the typeface is decently small and packed pretty close together. These are things that I normally would never talk about with a book. It doesn’t really usually matter to me. But in this case, I think it’s relevant because the book is so densely packed with characters and conversations and narration, to a superlative degree, really, that the novel’s length and sort of unrelenting pacing on its own terms, which is rather slow, creates a very unusual experience for the reader.

There is a story in The Strudlhof Steps, if you can call it a story. It’s far from conventional. In fact, it takes over 100 pages of character introductions and seemingly meaningless events before anything resembling a story really even begins to formulate. But the story itself, too, is very disjointed, and it is like a web of narrative threads that often intersect with one another but rarely, if ever, all connect.

There isn’t a single storyline in The Strudlhof Steps. And it makes sense that there wouldn’t be a single storyline because The Strudlhof Steps is not really a story about a person or about an event. It’s a story about a place, which is Vienna, both before and after World War I, although World War I does not feature in the novel other than as a passing allusion sometimes. It’s never treated with much gravity. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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a month ago

**spoilers ahead**

The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei is essentially an anti-capitalist novella. Part of what makes it interesting, I think, is that it is written in the first person, not totally unlike a Japanese I-novel in its scope or emphasis on a single person’s lived experience from a personal point of view. But Fei is really concerned with how society impacts the narrator psychologically and subliminally as he navigates his life.

It’s easy to connect a vague fatalistic thread with the work, but I do think that Fei is rather explicitly anti-capitalist (or, more accurately, anti-“economics as oppression). We see the narrator’s unfortunate circumstances, both those that are explicitly economic, like him losing his residence, having difficulty finding work in his field, and generally not having much money, and also personal, like him losing his wife, best friend, and sister for various reasons. Economics functions like a wedge between the personal relationships among all the characters.

If I had any criticism of the novel, which is rather well written and effective, it’s that the architecture is a little too visible. I think it becomes obvious in the last third of the novel what Fei’s ideological leanings are. We see time and again throughout the novella, for me almost to the point of exhaustion, that relationships among all the characters exist merely as transactions, even when they’re meant to be personal. That’s what I found to be the heart of Fei’s criticism: that meaningful friendships, familial relationships, and romance cannot exist within a capitalist structure without status, finances, and even material things functioning as obstacles or meaning-making symbols, which, from Fei’s point of view, really soils the purity of relationships. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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2 months ago

** spoilers ahead **

I interpreted Hansen’s The Liar as a work that is sneakily about destabilized reality. There’s a lot of hidden architecture in this novel, I think. While on the surface it’s rather straightforward, you have a self-proclaimed liar, Johannes, who is a teacher and is also in love with one of his former pupils. His love affair with her is doomed, ironically, because he is seeking an honest resolution to her affair with him and another man, while she’s simultaneously engaged to Olaf, the father of her son, who is away on a trip but is returning soon.

But it’s key that Johannes is seeking a truthful resolution in which Anne-Marie, the woman he loves, breaks up with Olaf, who’s far away. Only after they’ve broken up in person will Johannes accept Anne-Marie. It is implied that Anne-Marie returns his feelings, and yet the third man in this love polygon, Harry, who is an engineer visiting the island, is ultimately who Anne-Marie chooses, and they leave the island together.

The crucial part of this, I think, is that Johannes futilely seeks an honest reckoning in the relationship between Anne-Marie and Olaf before he can physically pursue her. By the time that happens, however, it is too late, but that is by design. Hansen does that to mirror the futility of truthfulness in this interpersonal context, and that sentiment is echoed frequently throughout the novel.

Johannes himself is at odds with his behavior as a manipulator and liar in a way that he seems ashamed of but simultaneously feels is beyond his control. At one point, he mentions that he feels like he’s possessed by a devil. He can’t help but sort of wedge himself among the people he is conversing with, who seek his advice and conversation, and subtly manipulate them to receive favorable outcomes in his own life. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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2 months ago

****ending spoilers within***

My key takeaway from A Month in the Country is that the fragility of an opportunity which represents unlimited possibility toward an unlimited hypothetical happiness is at friction with temporality. It seemed to me that the constraints placed upon the narrator, primarily the fleeting and transient opportunity at changing his life and finding love, fatefully and mercilessly deny a second chance at autonomy once it had been granted to him.

What I’m referencing is that, at the end of the novel, the narrator has a chance to be with a woman he loves, who is married, but he misses a critical yet incredibly subtle hint from the woman that she’s interested in him. And fifty or so years later, he’s still reflecting on this event.

But my read of the novel is anything but cynical. There are a couple of important pieces here that paint a nuanced picture of the narrator’s reflections. And while they’re not all positive, they’re also not all negative.

It’s important to understand first the further constraints of the narrator’s autonomy and the overwhelming yet incredibly subtle influence of both war trauma, which is casually referenced throughout the novel but never fully explored, and relationship trauma from being cheated upon by his wife and generally mistreated by her.

And these factors, the reader infers, are really what the narrator is escaping from, both physically, as a result of his work in a church restoring a massive painting and, I guess, a belfry or something like that, and mentally as well.

The country that he goes to, this, I assume, fictional rural town, functions like a paradise for him, but one that he knows inherently is temporary and that must be preserved through his memory, because only by preserving it through his memory can he keep it perfect. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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3 months ago

*******note - ending spoilers within*******

The Pornographer by John McGahern is a book about an aimless thirty-year-old man perversifying his own life through his fiction. By trade, he is a pornographer, and while some of his raunchy writing is featured throughout the text, it only really serves the purpose of demonstrating the narrator Michael’s detachment from reality.

And for me, the pornography is somewhat of a bridge for Michael away from reality and toward a bleaker existence that he is shuttling toward. Michael is put in a predicament when he gets a woman pregnant whom he does not love but who is madly in love with him. And the tension in the text is his handling of this woman. From beginning to end, he is determined not to marry her and not to be with her until the very end.

But how Michael suffers is really McGahern’s core interest, and the tension that Michael navigates between his sexual impulsivities that, of course, fuel and are fueled by his writing, and his struggle acquiescing to reality is what’s at play in the work.

The choice of pornographer as Michael’s profession is clever, because we see throughout the text that banal details from Michael’s life recur in his own pornography and are either greatly exaggerated into some kind of impetus for wild, raunchy sex or are perversified in some other way. And conversely, his sexual writings bleed into his thinking, as well as, we can infer, his behavior, as he continues to take advantage of any opportunity he can to have sex with a few different women, including the one he gets pregnant, Josephine. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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3 months ago

At Kinosaki by Naoya Shiga is a story in which depersonalization is at the core of its purpose, with the cleverly crafted story functioning as an exploration of Shiga’s personal trauma after a major incident when he was hit by a trolley car. During his recovery, he becomes increasingly fixated on the serendipity of his survival and attempts to come to terms with why he survived and gradually extrapolates his experience to the opaque rules of the world. While it is an incredibly brief, almost Chekhovian exploration of self-awareness, the incidences that Shiga recounts increasingly clarify his position on how one comes to terms with sudden or unexpected death.

While he survived his near-death experience, he encounters a couple of creatures, such as a wasp, a rat, and eventually a lizard, who all meet a sudden and fateful sort of death. And he continually tries to recontextualize his near-death experience based on what happens to these creatures.

The first, which is a wasp, suddenly dies for no clear reason and is washed away by the rain in a sad sort of state. And its corpse disappears into the world. Whereas the rat is impaled by a fishing hook of some kind and is desperately trying to survive while being caught up in a river stream, and a couple of bystanders are throwing rocks at it, kind of playing around with it. And finally, there’s a lizard that Shiga encounters that he impulsively and somewhat unthinkingly throws a rock toward, not attempting to hit it, and he does hit it and kills it.

So I just found it fascinating that Shiga begins with a human perspective on death and attempts to work his way back up to humanity by starting with the lowliest of creatures, an insect, and then moving up through increasingly more intelligent creatures and how they can meet their own death in such a myriad of ways, while the responsibility of humans, including himself, toward the death of these creatures also becomes increasingly interrogated. by @windupwolf

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4 months ago

Mrs Dalloway is probably one of the most successful formally inventive novels that I’ve read in the sense that the narrative techniques appear as necessities and not merely gimmicks in the telling of Woolf’s story.

I found that the impermeability of others’ consciousnesses and how these misconceptions alter our own thought processes and perceptions was a key feature of Woolf’s perspective on society. And society itself features as a character in the novel, with the characters existing throughout London, sometimes connecting, sometimes disconnecting, and Woolf traveling through space to inhabit characters’ minds at various points in the novel.

And although the characters are not always explicitly connected, her method of transporting us into their consciousnesses creates a sense that the reality of the novel’s setting is distorted by the delusions that these characters experience. Not hallucinogenic delusions or anything like that, just the mere personal perceptions and judgments that we carry out are delusional due to our limitations as humans, as far as our ability to be truthful to ourselves and others and rein in our personal biases and desires.

By each person existing in their own distorted reality, reality itself appears delusional, and I found that the book had a rather surreal quality to it, which I would describe as being very noisy and fast-paced. There is a real outpouring of thoughts and a ridiculously brisk pace that is never broken up by chapters or breaks. Woolf never pulls back.

Other people also function as an escape from self, as our thoughts are constantly consumed by other people. Our thoughts are constantly consumed by thoughts of other people or fantasies about them or experiences with them, and projections are made about them. Woolf demonstrates how essential our close connections are to the people that we are and have become. The inextricability of everyone is central to the novel’s thesis, in the sense that even though we are several degrees of separation from others, they still impact our lives and our trajectory. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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4 months ago

After Dark by Haruki Murakami is a minor work in his catalog that functions a lot like a mood piece and is not as heavily symbolic as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or some of his greater works. I do find that it has a thematic voice. And in typical Murakami fashion, it’s rather vaguely elucidated, but nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that Murakami was trying to go for something here.

But I do want to first address the structure of the novel, which I actually found was an overwhelming strength. Overwhelming in the sense that it was unequivocally effective. And I just thought it was clever, but not in a way that made it arbitrarily gimmicky, but more so that it was conscious of its gimmick, leaned into it, and delivered because of it and not in spite of it, and not for the sake of executing something experimental, but as a genuine function of the novel.

Here Murakami utilizes a great deal of white space and constrained margins, which artificially lengthens the novel to about 250 pages, but with a different setup, I do think the novel would probably be around 150 or even less than that. For me, it’s probably novella length if we went by word count because the novel’s also heavily dialogic, but I thought it was a fascinating extra-textual choice to constrain the margins so heavily and utilize so much white space, whether that’s through dialogue or margin use or even chapters ending high up on a page to create a lot of space (continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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5 months ago

The Piano Tuner’s Wives is a short story by William Trevor that
provides some human insight on what love looks like, or what it can look like, and sort of questions what it should look like. The premise of the story is that a blind but highly respected piano tuner in a rural Irish community marries a woman in the midst of a love triangle. And the community feels that he marries the wrong woman, in a sense, because Belle, the woman he does not marry, clearly loves him, whereas Violet, the woman he does marry, is not as fit for him, nor is she as beautiful or generally well-liked as Belle. So the text sort of leads the reader into making judgments on the piano tuner’s choice, and his blindness is not really just a feature of his character, but is portrayed as being central to who he is and who he has become, and by extension of that, bleeds into his choice of Violet being his first wife.

After Violet’s death, the piano tuner does marry Belle, but the damage that the first marriage has caused is the central tension in Belle’s later life. We learn that, and this is through William Trevor’s skillful understating, Violet was married because of her functionality as the piano tuner’s wife, whereas Belle was perhaps always loved by the piano tuner in a romantic sense. That is left somewhat ambiguous, but I certainly believe she was, and yet, he chose Violet. She was more capable or able to drive him around for his various jobs. Trevor drops some interesting hints throughout the text that confirm that Violet was married because she’s a functional choice, such as that she didn’t want children with the piano tuner. Now, normally that is just a detail or a choice that must be made in most marriages, but it’s implied that because the piano tuner is blind that Violet would not want blind children, whereas Belle admitted to herself that she would have given children to the piano tuner. It’s those kind of small details, left unexplained, that provide such a strong contrast, but only exist as undercurrents in the narrative that must be caught by the reader in order to unlock the full meaning of Trevor’s portrayal of these domestic lives. (Continued in comments). by @windupwolf

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6 months ago

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck is a political statement as much as it is a novel, and while that labeling already sets the book up for failure, since it is unusual for a literary work to be both overtly political and effective, Erpenbeck somehow manages this. I would attribute this success to three main factors.

First is her polyphonic approach, which includes not only a narrative but also essays, secondhand readings of textbooks, political discussions, and historical references. These elements support the novel’s thesis rather than distract from it, while also adding variety to the reading experience. This blending of historical fact, contemporary commentary, and fictional narrative comes off far more seamlessly than it would in the hands of a less talented author.

Another major strength is Erpenbeck’s cool detachment from her characters. Similar to how Elena Ferrante avoids sentimentality while portraying societies on the verge of collapse, Erpenbeck does not try to endear the reader to her characters. Instead, she forces the reader to confront their situations as the characters themselves are confronting them. This restraint prevents the novel from becoming cloying or morally simplistic.

Lastly, Erpenbeck wields a bitter irony that is not always obvious to the reader until midway through the narrative, when the pieces begin to click and one realizes that she is moving toward a hybrid form of novel and refugee manifesto. Some of this irony appears in depictions of overstaffed social work offices and hospitals where people are essentially doing nothing, while refugees are literally dying in the pursuit of work in Germany.
(Continued in Comments). #GoWentGone
#JennyErpenbeck
#PoliticalFiction
#LiteraryRealism
#ContemporaryLiterature by @windupwolf

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10 months ago

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa is ostensibly a collection of horror stories, but while it does adopt a certain horror aesthetic, it is really quite far away from genre fiction. I would not even consider it literary genre fiction, nor would I look at it as Japanese pop-export fiction like so much contemporary Japanese writing out there. In fact, I think Revenge is probably one of the strongest pieces of Japanese literary fiction to come out of the 21st century.

As I mentioned, Revenge incorporates some horror elements, but the creepy aesthetic is really more of a byproduct of Ogawa’s thematic interests and not the point of the reading itself. In this collection, she does something I have never really seen done before, which could easily backfire as gimmickry but does not, which is the object recursion present among the stories. There are various symbols that reappear in multiple stories that illuminate meaning that was only merely established in preceding stories. Other than that, this technique is used to establish metafictional layers in a very Paul Auster-ian kind of way. It did not surprise me to learn that Yoko Ogawa was deeply influenced by Paul Auster, and some of her tricks here, while undoubtedly uniquely executed, do echo my reading of The New York Trilogy.

And while the metafictional lens is not negligible, it was not really the focus of my reading personally. I was more interested in Ogawa’s key theme here. Ogawa establishes an inner world among her characters, which, by the way, are all written in the first person and are all nameless — There is not a single named character in this story — But she establishes an inner world that is simultaneously compressed by outer forces and derivative of the inner worlds of all others. There is a thread of universality among her characters accentuated by their namelessness. And this thread is not a reflection of any indictment on individuality, but rather a tool that reinforces fate’s systematic imprisonment of individuals to its undeniable force. (Continued in comments). #YokoOgawa
#Revenge11DarkTales
#JapaneseLiterature
#ModernJapaneseFiction
#ShortStoryCollection by @windupwolf

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10 months ago