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

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1923)

2023 reads, 11.75/12 (Interlude II):

To finish my Gravity's Rainbow interlude, I read the final major work of Rilke I had yet to read, The Sonnets to Orpheus. These are a series of 55 sonnets, written in two linked cycles (representing life and death?), written in 1922 in the span of about three weeks.

These poems are described as religious, but I would instead broaden that to spiritual. Like, intensely spiritual. This mysticism is mixed with themes of solitude, life & death, and the arts. In Greek myth, Orpheus was a bard, so symbols of music (specifically a lyre) are interspersed throughout these poems. These symbols are used as a device to represent creating poetry, but I felt it applied to any creative endeavor.

“He alone who has known the roots of the willow can bend the willow-branch into a lyre.”

Like the Elegies, these poems are as deep as you want them to be. You can let the words flow over you, or you can do as much digging as you want, line-by-line, picking apart the allegories, personification, and symbolism throughout. However, I found them to be more readable on the surface than the Duino Elegies. If you are looking to get into Rilke, I would start here (or his Letters to a Young Poet).

“Oh unheard starry music! Isn’t your sound protected from all static by the ordinary business of our days?”

#readingyear2023 #poetry

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)

2023 reads, 11.5/12 (Interlude):

I just got to “Part 4: The Counterforce” in Gravity's Rainbow, which I heard is heavily influenced by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, an early 20th-century German poet. Before continuing on, I figured I’d pause for a brief interlude and catch up a bit on his work (having read The Duino Elegies last year).

This is a collection of letters that Rilke sent to Franz Xaver Kappus, a student at a military academy who sent Rilke his own poems, asking for advice. They correspond over the course of six years, and this published collection contains Rilke’s ten letters to Kappus. These letters touch upon many of the themes in Rilke's work: most notably art, solitude, the difficulty of aligning with a religion. They alternate between down-to-earth passages (I laughed at “today writing is not going to be easy because I have had to write a good number of letters already and my hand is tired” – you didn’t have to write this sentence?) and highly profound statements – highly recommended for anyone wanting to get more into writing or poetry.

“We have already had to adjust our understanding of so many theories of planetary motion, and so too we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate originates in ourselves, in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside.”

#readingyear2023 #poetry

by Clarice Lispector (1943)

2023 reads, 11/12:

“One day she split into two, grew restless, started going out to look for herself.”

I was overjoyed to finally get back into the mystic prose of Clarice Lispector after ending last year with her final book, The Hour of the Star. Her first book, Near to the Wild Heart, written at only 23 years old, ‘follows’ the story of the amoral Joanna. From childhood to adulthood, we don't learn about her in a linear fashion, but in fleeting memories throughout her life. We know everything, yet nothing, about her; Lispector writes a minimal plot at best, opting instead for a spiritual and existential journey through the psyche of Joana through these vignettes of her life. As an example, my favorite chapter, ‘The Encounter with Otávio,’ takes place in the few minutes you are awake in the middle of the night, the ones you don’t even remember after you wake up.

“The dense, dark night was cut down the middle, split into two black blocks of sleep. Where was she? Between the two pieces, looking at them (the one she had already slept, and the one she had yet to sleep), isolated in the timeless and the spaceless, in an empty gap. This stretch would be subtracted from her years of life.”

Joana is an extremely complex character, as she is introspective yet wild, reserved yet disturbed, even violent at time; yet her actions and interactions with others (her aunt, her teacher, her husband Otávio, his old friend Lídia, etc.) take a back seat to her thoughts. Lispector even went as far as to include thoughts from the perspective of these other characters, which helped break apart all the material on Joana.

Towards the end, we are inundated with the phrase de profundis (Latin: “from the depths”), encapsulating all of Joana’s thoughts and decisions we’ve read thus far. Things start to make sense now. The remainder of the book then floods with these stream-of-consciousness monologues ‘from the depths’ of Joana, her visions and thoughts constantly bombarding the reader. In these sections, you must let the words flow through you; I even found myself having to reread passages. This style of writing is a hit or miss, but for me, I can’t wait to dive into other works of “Hurricane Clarice.”

“The two of them sank into a solitary, calm silence. Years passed perhaps. Everything was so limpid as an eternal star and they hovered so quietly that they could feel future time rolling lucid inside their bodies with the thickness of the long past which instant by instant they had just lived.”

#readingyear2023 #physicallyowned #lispector

by H. Jon Benjamin (2018)

2023 reads, 10/12:

Audible gave me a free audiobook, so I wanted to choose something that was not only interesting but had a narrator I would enjoy – so when I saw that H. Jon Benjamin had narrated his own memoir, I knew I had to listen to it. I’m a huge fan of Bob’s Burgers, and I've enjoyed some of his other works (though I never got into Archer), so I figured it would be nice to see how he came into his iconic TV roles.

What I got instead was a hilarious collection of anecdotes and stories from his childhood and teenage years all the way through to his current career. If you are looking for behind-the-scenes information on Bob’s Burgers or Archer, he barely gets into them in the last two chapters of the book. He instead spends time discussing his upbringing, his family, and his failed attempts at writing and starring in TV shows. His stories are insane, especially taken out of context:

“You know that feeling when you realize you have to spend an entire summer with a convicted felon? That’s how I felt.”

This book is downright comical, and his comedic ‘lists’ at the end of certain chapters do satisfy that Bob’s Burger’s-esque pun craving. Anyone remotely interested in his life will get something out of this (especially when he’s the one narrating, so I again highly recommend the audiobook version).

#readingyear2023 #audiobook #bio #humor

edited and translated by Robert Hass (1994)

2023 reads, 9/12:

Poetry was really interesting when we learned about it in school, but it was never my favorite unit in lit class because it was taught with so many ‘rules’ (limericks, acrostics, triplets, etc.). However, the biggest ‘rule’ drilled into our heads was that haikus follow the 5-7-5 syllable structure. Reading these poems dating back to the ‘birth’ of haiku, with masters Bashō, Buson, and Issa, has further opened my mind to what a haiku can truly be. The journal entries from each of these masters were also super interesting, and ended up enriching their respective poetry.

#readingyear2023 #physicallyowned #poetry