foggyreads

by Clarice Lispector (1973)

2024 reads, 5/22

“This text that I give you is not to be seen close up: it gains its secret previously invisible roundness when seen from a high-flying plane. Then you can divine the play of islands and see the channels and seas. Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language. I’m not transmitting to you a story but just words that live from sound.”

Água Viva seems to delicately straddle the line between novella, poetry, meditation, conversation, and monologue. It’s pretty short, but don’t let the page count fool you – I had to reread multiple passages to even attempt an understanding of her words. But if you break through her prose, you are treated with a linguistic tour de force of a novel.

“Every once in a while I’ll give you a light story— melodic and cantabile area to break up this string quartet of mine: a figurative interval to open a clearing in my nourishing jungle.”

As far as I’m aware, Água Viva is the only title of Lispector’s that isn’t translated from Portuguese. There seems to be no good translation; it can literally translate to “jellyfish,” but “stream of life,” “running water,” or even “where all flows” are better approximations. My favorite of these is “running water,” since the narrator seems to bubble up this stream-of-consciousness of never-ending thoughts. It’s filled with metaphors, fourth wall breaks, and beautiful imagery of the human condition – sometimes it’s even a bit discomforting.

Is there a plot? Not really. The most I could surmise about the narrator was that they were an artist, maybe a painter or musician, now attempting writing: the experience of writing itself, its relation to other arts, and life. This writing can be distant and seemingly cryptic. But imagery revolving around the natural world is explored as well, such as the passage where the narrator personifies different types of flowers. It’s these passages that feel like the narrator is Lispector herself – and I believe it’s her way of grounding her cosmic language with us.

“I’m going to make an adagio. Read slowly and with peace. It’s a wide fresco.”

How cool was that? The musical metaphor almost immediately morphed into an artistic metaphor – this type of contorting language is used often. It displaced me at first. But the moments where she seems disconnected from us, where she reaches the depths of the human condition (recalling de profundis, if you’ve read Near to the Wild Heart), are equally balanced by moments of direct language: we are reprieved, for the time being. The oscillation between her shallow and intense prose is yet another representation of this running water, this breathing of language, this água viva.

“For now there’s dialogue with you. Then it will be monologue. Then the silence. I know that there will be an order.”

Lispector has slowly but surely climbed her way among my favorite authors with this one. Infinitely returnable and emotionally unfiltered, there’s always something new to discover in each reread. If you’re looking for something different, give Água Viva a chance. Analyze it in depth, or let the words wash over you: you’ll be rewarded either way.

“Today I finished the canvas I told you about: curves that intersect in fine black lines, and you, with your habit of wanting to know why— I’m not interested in that, the cause is past matter—will ask me why the fine black lines? because of the same secret that now makes me write as if to you, writing something round and rolled up and warm, but sometimes cold as the fresh instants, the water of an ever-trembling stream. Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound.”

Addendum: A similar experience to reading this would be listening to Tim Hecker’s ambient album Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again in full; it’s a perfect pairing. Both are meditative and thought-provoking, seasoned with a slight lingering discomfort throughout.

#readingyear2024 #favorites #philosophy #wtf #physicallyowned #lispector

by Stephen King (1984)

2024 reads, 4/22

“Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon.”

It may seem odd to spend over 600 pages on a book that was only three stars (maybe closer to a 3.5), but to be honest, this was a solid 4-star book until the last quarter or so. Overall, this was a good nighttime read: just a fantasy adventure of 12-year-old Jack Sawyer crossing the United States to get to the mysterious Talisman in order to save his mother. While there were monsters and horrors along the way, The Talisman was more adventure, and I guess I had expected an equal amount of each.

The text could feel a bit disjointed at times, likely due to the fact the there were two authors who wrote this (having read some Stephen King before, this didn’t really feel 100% like him). But honestly, you could read much worse, and this book does not deter me from wanting to read the sequel, Black House. Although I think my next few King books will be more focused on horror. Maybe Misery...

#readingyear2024 #spooky #audiobook #fantasy

by Lisa See (2019)

2024 reads, 3/22

(shout out to my friend Meesun for gifting me this book!)

Last year I attempted to read Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, but ended up DNFing it, because it was a cursory look at decades and decades of geopolitics through a pro-U.S. militaristic lens. Seriously, the author had something negative to say about every country – except the United States 😬. But I only bring this up because after reading The Island of Sea Women, I realized that this (well-researched!) historical fiction had much more of an impact on my understanding of history than Prisoners of Geography ever could.

The Island of Sea Women follows childhood friends Young-sook and Mi-ja as they join their Jeju Island village’s diving collective as haenyeo (female divers). Early on, we are also introduced to the concept of sumbisori, the physical sound a haenyeo makes after resurfacing from a long dive. I loved this, and I believed it was a metaphor for the entire novel.

“The sumbisori is the special sound—like a whistle or a dolphin’s call—a haenyeo makes as she breaches the surface of the sea and releases the air she’s held in her lungs, followed by a deep intake of breath.”

We observe Young-sook, Mi-ja, and the village throughout the twentieth-century historical events that occur on Jeju (and Korea as a whole). Over a span of seventy years, we learn about the Japanese occupation of Korea, the People's Committees of post-WWII Korea, the Korean war, Jeju 4.3, the Bukchon massacre (this chapter was really hard to read), and Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), just to name a few. We experience these events through Young-sook, so reading the last chapter feels like the sumbisori of the book itself: Young-sook’s deeply personal reaction to the trauma and hardships she experienced.

This book is an important one, and I believe that it covers many things that should be taught in history classes. Seeing these events through the eyes of Young-sook helps someone like me better understand the world – which is what Prisoners of Geography failed to do.

“‘Together our sumbisori create a song of the air and wind on Jeju. Our sumbisori is the innermost sound of the world. It connects us to the future and the past. Our sumbisori allows us first to serve our parents and then our children.’”

#readingyear2024 #physicallyowned #history

by Kakuzō Okakura (1906)

2024 books, 2/22:

“Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.”

I feel like this year I want to make good progress on my “Want to Read” collection (easier said than done, as it continuously grows anyways), so I’ve been browsing my list, seeing what I’ve previously shelved that I might want to dive into.

The Book of Tea is a short collection of essays on the Japanese art of the tea ceremony, as well as its Chinese influences. Throughout its chapters, Kakuzō covers the schools of thought regarding tea, how Taoism and Zen are intertwined with the tea ceremony, and the architecture of the tearoom. He actually spends very little time on the cup of tea itself, opting to focus more on the journey to that cup.

This book is poetic, philosophical, and historic all in one. Kakuzō will even compare the differences between Eastern traditions of tea and art with West (with a clear bias towards the former). I love learning about Taoism, and its relation to tea, therefore this was a great accompaniment to my morning tea session.

“The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

by Thomas Pynchon (1990)

2024 reads, 1/22:

“When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colors of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally — here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution.”

The year is 1984, and surrounded by the old-growth redwoods in northern California, Vineland thrusts us into the lives of ex-hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie, who must go into hiding because of the return of a federal agent from Zoyd’s past. As they go into hiding, Prairie starts to learn more about the life of her mother she never knew, Frenesi.

This is a Russian doll of a novel; we gradually loop, alongside Prairie, from the eighties to the sixties and even earlier, to learn about the events surrounding her mother. As part of a film collective in the late sixties, we see the dismantling of the counterculture movement through Frenesi’s eyes, through her old flings, her mistakes, and ultimately, her disappearance.

Along the way, different characters’ histories are also explored, such as Frenesi’s kunoichi friend DL, ‘karmic adjuster’ Takeshi Fumimota, and mathematics professor Weed Atman. Not only were these characters three-dimensional, but their relationships were more defined. For example, I loved reading the history of how DL and Takeshi met, their back-and-forth bickering like an old married couple. Furthermore, the love that Zoyd has for his daughter, Prairie, is so clearly carried throughout the whole book, and I found myself caring for them both. Vineland is, so far, Pynchon’s most sentimental book.

“Following the wisdom of the time, Zoyd, bobbing around among the flotsam of his sunken marriage, had been giving in to the impulse to cry, anytime it came on him, alone or in public, Getting In Touch With His Feelings at top volume, regardless of how it affected onlookers, their own problems, their attitude toward life, their lunch.”

The backdrop of Vineland, like Inherent Vice, is the decline of sixties counterculture; however, taking place a little over a decade after the events of IV, the anti-counterculture faction is much stronger now. Reagan is president, federal agencies such as the D.E.A. are in full force, and the sixties youth is feeling the pressure to come and participate in the current times. Businesses are booming, and everything is now commodified, able to be procured at the local mall. Case in point, the ‘designer seltzer dispenser’ produced by Yves St. Laurent, or even the local pizza joint where Prairie worked, serving a high-quantity yet low-quality product:

“Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.”

Delicious, right?

I also loved the theme of communication and hidden signals that Vineland exhibits so well: messages are seemingly constantly bombarding Zoyd, Prairie, Frenesi, DL, and others, usually originating from the ‘Tube’ (the always-capitalized TV slang, signifying its place in the eighties as a Proper Noun). For Zoyd specifically, these Videodrome-esque messages had me constantly asking: is some technocratic higher power forcing these messages unto him? Or is Zoyd, maybe subconsciously, getting himself into his own situations, unable to resist? Maybe, it’s some intertwined combination of the two, like Todd from BoJack Horseman.

“He bounced slowly from one Honolulu bar to another, allowing himself to trust to the hidden structures of night in a city, to a gift he sometimes thought he had for drifting, if not into intersections of high drama and significant fortune, at least away, most of the time, from danger.”

In many ways, this novel reminded me of White Noise, with its similar themes on technology & commodification, pop culture, and changing times. Jack Gladney and Zoyd Wheeler would hit it off, Gladney talking about his fear of death, and Zoyd his fear of life. This was a great read: character-driven, hilarious yet heartwarming, filled with pop culture, with a bit of cynicism as well. I still think TCoL49 is his best book to start with, but if you want to get into Pynchon, this is probably the second-best starting point.

“It was like being on 'Wheel of Fortune,' only here there were no genial vibes from any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at the corner of [Zoyd’s] vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip over one by one letters of a message he knew he didn't want to read anyway.”

#readingyear2024 #govpol #pynchon #physicallyowned

by Thomas Pynchon (1963)

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?”

V. is Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, a postmodern maze of settings and plot lines, written almost unbelievably at twenty-six years old. The usual Pynchonian themes are here: paranoia, control, and conspiracy. However, this felt like his most disjointed book out of all the ones I’ve read so far (those being The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Gravity’s Rainbow). It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are entire chapters that introduce new characters never to be seen again – one can almost read this as a collection of loosely connected short stories.

We begin on Christmas Eve, 1955, where the first of two main protagonists, discharged U.S. Navy sailor Benny Profane, wanders into a local bar. In the next chapter, British Foreign Officer Herbert Stencil is introduced, as well as his quest for a woman referred to as ‘V.’ in his father’s notebooks. Other characters include (but are not limited to) Profane’s love interest Rachel, her roommate Esther, the NYC artist Slab, and psychologist/dentist Dr. Dudley Eigenvalue. From here, the novel takes us to New York City, Egypt, Italy, Southwest Africa, Malta, and Paris, all at different times in history, loosely connected by the mysterious V.

“Though offering no clue to their enigma; for they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate: a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced until some more catholic light moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure. What then? Politics, perhaps.”

Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, which takes place during WWII, this novel deals with the aftermath of said war. But it’s not spoken about directly, save for a comment here or there; it’s shown to us by what happens as Profane, Stencil, and others yo-yo around their lives, looking for meaning, constantly resisting becoming ‘inanimate’ or ‘non-human’ – driven lifeless by the horrors of war. This motif was probably my favorite throughout the book, best personified by the crash-test dummy SHOCK.

“SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he'd got used to it.”

The slow acceptance, or “getting used to,” of becoming inanimate is what some of these characters attempt (and fail) to resist. Slab’s painting Cheese Danish No. 35, for example, presents a bird constantly eating from the tree in which it resides, never needing to move, as the tree keeps growing, eventually impaling the bird on a gargoyle’s tooth at the top of the painting.

“‘Why can't he fly away?’ Esther said. ‘He is too stupid. He used to know how to fly once, but he's forgotten.’ ‘I detect allegory in all this,’ she said. ‘No,’ said Slab.”

Pynchon also proposes that the WWII ‘Kilroy is here’ drawing originated as band-pass filter schematic, further solidifying that in war we are ever so close to being mechanical and inhuman. Fortunately, the antidote to this “non-humanity” is alluded to – individuality. In “Chapter 11: Confessions of Fautso Maijstral”, we follow multiple versions of Fausto before, during, and after the WWII siege of Malta, each version exhibiting differing levels of humanity. Tragic events bring him to an almost inanimate existence, but the slow process of living and consistently being himself brings him back.

"Mathematically, boy," [Eigenvalue] told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.

But V. is also upfront about the discomforts of war, particularly “Chapter 9: Mondaugen’s story.” Just like in Gravity’s Rainbow, the genocide of the Herero population plays an important part to the story, but in V., there is a more graphic depiction from the point of view of the Germans. It’s rough. Not just because this is something that is lost to history (the first I’ve heard of this genocide was during my GR read), but it’s from the point of view of the white Kurt Mondaugen. However, because it’s from his point of view, it allows these horrors to be portrayed ethically; if Pynchon decided to write this story from the Herero point of view, that would be silencing and appropriating their voice. I can’t explain it any more eloquently than this quote from Ariel Saramandi, Editor-in-Chief of Transect Magazine, from her excellent article Thomas Pynchon Shows Us How White Writers Can Avoid Appropriation:

“…you see the genocide unfold through Mondaugen’s eyes, the reader feels like a witness, hands tied and somehow complicit in the mechanisms of white history. Indifference is impossible. The colonists’ actions are told in the same, detached voice as the German reports, a voice that showcases the utter, systemic dehumanization of the Hereros…”

V. is tough, and it wouldn’t be my suggested starting point for reading Pynchon. The connections are harder to find, but following a Reddit reading group, with summaries and analyses after each chapter, was actually pretty fun – I love hearing what others take away from their reading. The historical events being used as a backdrop for the overall themes kept me engaged throughout, as well as rooting for Profane and Stencil to (hopefully) find what they’re looking for.

“Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?”

#readingyear2023 #history #physicallyowned #pynchon

by Stephen King (1975)

"‘I haven’t given up hope of rational explanations, Susan. I’m hoping for one. Almost praying for one. Monsters in the movies are sort of fun, but the thought of them actually prowling through the night isn’t fun at all.’”

I may be entering my Stephen King era after this read. Back in high school I had read some of his shorter works, but I don’t think I was old enough at the time to appreciate his storytelling. As I currently contemplate whether I want to jump into his seven-volume Dark Tower series, I figured a good place to start is with one of his earlier and more well-known novels.

In the expanded edition’s introduction (which is well worth the read, by the way), King cites Bram Stoker’s Dracula as his source of inspiration – he wanted to explore what would have happened if Dracula appeared in 1960’s small-town America instead of 1890’s London. ‘Salem’s Lot also has many homages to Shirly Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You certainly don’t need to read either of these to enjoy ‘Salem’s Lot, but having read them, I felt I appreciated his novel that much more.

“Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.”

In fact, much like The Haunting of Hill House, the further I got in ‘Salem’s Lot, the more I wanted to read – but for a different reason. Instead of just wanting questions answered and tension resolved, as I did in Jackson’s novel, there was more ‘action’ in this book that I wanted to get to; I constantly wanted to know what happened next. It was enticing, entertaining, emotional, and spooky all at once.

It’s also worth pointing out that the many childhood themes (e.g., guilt, fear, loss of innocence, the disconnect between children and adults) that permeate throughout King’s work start budding in ‘Salem’s Lot. I have not read It, but I’ve seen both the 1990 and 2017/2019 movies, and there are similarities between The Loser’s Club and the characters in this novel (specifically, Mark).

“Before drifting away entirely, [Mark] found himself reflecting—not for the first time—on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can’t get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child.”

Even though October is over, I recommend this to anyone who wants a spooky read, any time of the year.

#readingyear2023 #spooky #book2screen

by David Stubbs (2014)

“The rearrangement of rhythm in Krautrock, its novel textures and colouring, the relationship between instruments, song structures and spontaneous improvisation, are all metaphors for a necessary postwar reconstruction, the re-establishment of cultural identity.”

It’s hard to define Krautrock sonically, but you know it when you hear it. It was through the band Kraftwerk, one of the defining electronic bands of the seventies, that I started branching out into other bands of that time and place – this book then gave me a bigger picture of what the genre actually is.

Krautrock (originally a derogatory term from the British music press, using the German insult “Kraut”) styles can range from electronic, punk, ambient, psychedelic; some bands even embrace avant-garde and noise. But more than the music, these bands were making something authentically German, shying away from the influence of the British Invasion, rock ‘n’ roll or American blues.

“Springsteen, as ever, is preoccupied with keeping it ‘real’, yet his febrile lyrical visions are sheer rock ’n’ roll mythological hokum. Kraftwerk may look and sound ‘inauthentic’ but at least ‘Autobahn’ [the album] bears a closer resemblance to life as it is lived.”

I don’t think that Springsteen is inauthentic, but the above quote exhibits the difference in what these bands were striving for at the time (you can also see from the quote how Stubbs wears his opinions on his sleeve throughout the book). Krautrock’s authenticity can range from a beautiful psychedelic instrumental, a twenty-minute long ambient soundscape, or an extended improvisation over a simple motorik beat. Stubbs even describes one song as, ‘a high-pitched electronic peal around which the Moog [synthesizer] coils its oblique variations. For the less tolerant it will resemble an uninvestigated car alarm;’ – but don’t let this deter you from checking out some of these bands.

This book gives a great introduction to the history, stories, and relationships of the bands that formed the Krautrock genre. At times the text can be a bit bloated, especially with his strong bias, but Stubbs concludes the book well, chronicling bands that have gone on record describing their influence from Krautrock, including David Bowie, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Sonic Youth, Simple Minds, Soft Cell, Talking Heads, among many others. You may not have heard of Kraftwerk, but you have heard their influences in modern electronic/dance music (or even directly through sampling across all different musicians, e.g., Coldplay, New Order, Afrika Bambaataa, Dr. Dre, LCD Soundsystem, etc.). Anyone interested in music history, especially that of the 70s and 80s, would learn a lot from this book.

Addendum: This past summer I took a trip to Berlin for a conference and had some time to do some exploring. Maybe it was the fact that I had time to do a good amount of sightseeing, but I feel that the below quote perfectly captures what I liked about the city:

“No great city, not London, not New York, not Paris, not even Moscow, wears the scars of twentieth-century trauma the way Berlin does. Many of its streets and tenements are still riddled and strafed with bullet holes, a legacy of the Soviet advance on the city. Even today, with the remnants of Checkpoint Charlie cleared to make way for a vast business centre, the city is dotted with reminders and memorials of the Second World War, from the bleakly understated ‘Topography of Terror’, former site of the SS and the Gestapo in Niederkirchnerstrasse, to Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold’s Holocaust Memorial near to the Brandenburg Gate, whose sloping, undulating series of concrete slabs seeks to speak volumes about the unspeakable, in abstract form. Berlin is not exactly a ‘pretty’ city, in the cosy, old town, nostalgic sense. It is harsh, brusque in its modernity and its juxtapositions, though in unexpected spaces it throws up glimpses of the surreal.”

#readingyear2023 #music #history #german

by Shirley Jackson (1959)

“Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away. . .”

Going into this, I had no idea that any preconceived notion of a ‘haunted house story’ I had would completely vanish – but despite this, it was still a perfect October read. Expecting the literary equivalent of jump scares, I instead got this gothic blanket of uneasiness, unfamiliarity, and tension, consistently asking myself while reading, what does it mean to be haunted? I didn't get an answer, but by the time I finished, I understood the question better.

Shirley Jackson does a superb job at taking the time and fleshing out the four main characters who stay in the house. It’s a slow but necessary introduction to appreciate the themes of belonging and identity throughout (among many other themes, too many to get into in this review). A house with an infamous past is the perfect backdrop to get into relationships between these characters.

“They were all silent, looking into the fire, lazy after their several journeys, and Eleanor thought, I am the fourth person in this room; I am one of them; I belong.”

I found that my reading speed was directly proportional to my progress in the book. Towards the end, it becomes almost impossible to put down, likely because there were more and more questions that I wanted answered (and if you finished the book, you may know why this is the case). This is a gothic classic that I recommend to anyone wanting to broaden their spooky novel repertoire.

“Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.”

#readingyear2023 #american #gothic #spooky #book2screen

by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

2023 reads, 12/12:

Thirty years ago, Martin Scorsese published an opinion piece in the New York Times, defending filmmakers, authors, and other artists whose “style gets in the way of [their] storytelling.” While this piece was mainly a rebuttal to an opinion piece on Federico Fellini, Scorsese lists Thomas Pynchon as one such artist who falls under this category. And after spending almost 50 hours with Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m here to say I agree and appreciate his defense.

I’ve ventured into Pynchon’s work before with The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice, and I loved them both, so it only made sense that I attempt Gravity’s Rainbow, in its 50th year of publication. Continuing Pynchon’s setting of alternative histories, this book takes place at the end of World War II in an alternate, dream-like, paranoid version of the European theatre.

“He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and goodnight cigarettes.”

The first part of the book, “Beyond the Zero,” was the most difficult to me. Pynchon loves to invoke hysteron proteron (Greek: “later earlier”) at all scales in this book, but mainly in this first section. Individual phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters are succumbed to this reversal in time: effect first, cause later. It’s even posed within the first few pages: “Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after?”

Pieces start to come together as you read, with connections being made right up to the end. Passages will run off track (example: the introduction of main character Katje, and then immediately being whisked back to the time of her ancestor and learning how he eradicated the dodo birds whilst envisioning them coming together and converting to Christianity). Its twists and turns aren’t for everybody, but everything is written for a reason. As I mentioned in my TCoL49 review, he writes how we think, re-experiencing whole memories in seconds.

“Connection? Of course there’s one. But we don’t talk about it.”

And that’s not to say that GR isn’t slightly prophetic as well. About 200 pages in, starting from the beginning of Part 2, the plot starts to kick in, and we find ourselves on cartoon-like cat-and-mouse chase throughout Parts 2 and 3. Along with control, themes such as War & technology, using The Rocket as a motif, constantly emerge. Pynchon’s books all have some inkling of paranoia as well, himself being a paranoid (you can count on one hand the number of photographs of him out there).

“...what do you think, it’s a children’s story? There aren’t any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth.”

Almost every sentence in GR has some reference to some historical event, person or slang that I’ve never heard of. Through reading I’ve learned about the Herero and Namaqua genocides, Kabbalist traditions, the Peenemunde slave camp, the Phoebus cartel (all historically factual, and some of which should have been taught in school) – all while reading actual rocket science. But this is not a textbook, there is a plot to be found here, with jokes and heartwarming moments as well.

“What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”

But you don’t need to get every reference to have fun, and I wouldn’t have read this if it wasn’t enjoyable. I’m nowhere near a WWII history buff, and I never will be, but this was fun and even hilarious at times (examples: Pirate’s banana breakfast, Slothrop’s stream-of-consciousness trip down a toilet looking for his harmonica, and Snake, the unpredictably homicidal horse being paid off to not appear in the US rodeo circuits). His style does not hinder what he is trying to say, I actually think it helps. It’s the mini-episodes make this book fun, it’s the math and physics jokes that make this book enjoyable, it’s the literary acid trips (especially in Part 4) that make this book thought-provoking, and it’s the commentary on politics, War, and control that make this book worth it. His prose is like no other – upon finishing the book the realization hit that I may never read something like it again.

“Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s minus infinity! How’s that for sudden change, eh?”

I’m not sure whether this review has convinced or deterred you, but if you fall in the former camp, the best pieces of advice I have are (1) borrow the eBook from your library (likely no one else is reading it, lol) and read on a Kindle for quick Wikipedia lookups and German translations, (2) read this guide after every chapter to recall the important plot points, and (3) just let your imagination run wild with him. But if this book doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, and you’ve made it to the end of this review, then at least read possibly my favorite quote of the whole book:

“They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in ’40, is still “regulated”—still on the Ministry’s list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they’re caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt’s grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger’s managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the empty garage. Whenever they meet here, one always remembers to bring a fresh flower or two. The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There’s never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire—but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.”

#readingyear2023 #american #physicallyowned #wtf #pynchon