MOON MOON

The year is coming to a close but I think I have enough time to squeeze in one more book before it ends if I spend my vacation leave wisely. I'm not strict on the number of books I have to read in a year (in fact, I don't think it's a very helpful goal to have) but there is still some satisfaction in knowing that I've read more books this year than I did the last.

The last fantasy novel I read was VanderMeer's A Peculiar Peril and while it did have its moments, it didn't quite scratch the itch to read a proper fantasy novel quite like A Spear Cuts Through Water. There is something satisfying about immersing yourself in an adventure. It's a nice break from the more plot-less or character-study novels that I typically read. It's also nice that we live in a time when queerness is no longer just a subtext. Although over-all I enjoyed the story, I find that the style didn't quite work for me. I understand that the second person point of view was used in service of the story but I couldn't really get into it. This is just a personal preference, though, and it didn't really affect my reading of it that much.

Hour of the Star is my first Lispector and I'm quite unsure how to feel about it. Zooming in, it feels confusing, the meaning obscured by Lispector's prose. Zooming out, the entire book starts to make more sense as the narrator's fears and existential crises comes to the forefront. There is a story within the story and in both of them one can find oneself. The author explores his own mind as he in turn explores his character's mind, using writing as a tool and as an escape.

I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd like to have what I would have been and never was.

The narrator Rodrigo S.M thus writes Macabea, a woman so far removed from his world (someone he "could have been and never was"). Macabea is a character who doesn't seem to have any agency, almost devoid of interior life. Yet, the narrator constantly describes her as being contented, almost happy, as if she didn't know that she should be unhappy. Yet there are moments where Macabea gains lucidity and depth despite the narrator's insistence that she is somehow too stupid to feel things.

But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul. She knew that there were a lot of things that she didn't know how to understand.


I forgot to say that it was really alarming that from Macabea's almost parched body so vast was her almost unlimited breath of life and as rich as of that of a pregnant maiden, impregnated by herself, by parthenogenesis; she had schizoid dreams in which giant antediluvian animals appeared as if she'd lived in the most remote epics of this bloody earth.

By the end of the novel the narrator understands why he writes the story and we in turn understand him a little better. It's amazing how many layers such a short book has. I started out saying that I was unsure about reading any more Lispector (because on a sentence level, this book can be confusing) but this writing this review has made me realize just how much I took away from it and how many wonderful passages there are that I've saved. I think this might be one of my top books for this year.

As much as I would love to give a proper review, I found this book to be incomprehensible. It feels very incomplete, made up of vignettes that almost, but not quite, cohere into a definite story. I could not make heads or tails of what is going on. On a sentence level, I can see that Bolaño is a very skilled writer but this one just eludes me. He said that this is the only book of his that he is proud of. Perhaps it is something personal to him. But as a reader with barely any knowledge of Bolaño's personal life or the circumstances that lead to him writing this book, I can't say that I appreciate it as much as he did. 

Parable of the Sower is the perfect book to read after the disappointment that is Booth. If I had read another bad or boring book, I think I would have gone into a reading slump. This novel is not only a page-turner, it also rewired how I view the world.

Parable of the Sower is set in a dystopian America in the year 2024. In this novel, Butler imagines the world to be a lawless and dangerous wasteland. Water and food are scarce and expensive, there is a drug problem plaguing the country, and people can only hope to protect their own community by keeping to themselves and surrounding themselves with walls. The law is useless - the police don't provide any real help and the president's solution seems to be to give corporations more power. Speaking of corporations, they run the cities with the promise of safety and jobs which don't pay enough but is still better than not having a job. It's actually uncanny how the summary for this novel written in 1993 fits so accurately with the current situation. While it is taken to the extreme, it's also not hard to imagine that this could very likely happen to us in the future if things continue moving the way they are now. However, as dismal as the future predicted by Butler may appear on the surface, at its center is a seed of hope.

Lauren Olamina, the main character of the novel, has her own belief system. She believes that God is change and that God, like clay, is infinitely malleable. She calls her belief Earthseed and she writes that the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. Naturally, she meets some resistance when she 'preaches' her belief her to her comrades. They find it hard to wrap their heads around the idea of a God who is not a being but an idea, a concept. To which Lauren replies:

Then show me a more persuasive power than change.

If the desire for God is ultimately a the desire to make sense of one's own life (as in, whatever is happening in my life is happening because God wills it so), then Lauren's belief that God is change certainly makes sense. Change as God is another way that life can make sense. It is a 'persuasive power' that likewise dictates our lives (everything we do is a way to adapt to changes in our lives). Unlike the Christian God, it is not a being that you worship.

Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.

It is a God that you shape and a God which, in turn, shapes you. I think herein lies the optimism in Butler's work. Humans are not the passive receivers of fate. Instead, we are active agents of our own life. This bears more responsibility, as we see with Lauren early in the book. She was heavily preoccupied with what-ifs and had to be prepared for what she saw as the inevitable change in her situation. Butler reminds us that we can create the changes we want to see in the world. In real life, I am wary of anything that posits life outside of Earth as a viable solution. (Are we to destroy other planets, too? Much like how to hope for a better life in heaven makes you neglect your current life, will starting over in a different planet justify destroying this planet that we are currently living in?) But seeing how far away Lauren and her gang is from space travel, it is interesting where Butler will take this story to actually reach Earthseed's supposed destiny. 

The Doloriad left me with an inexplicable feeling that I wanted to replicate by reading other books written by Williams. I found out that this is Williams' debut novel and now I'm just left feeling that some people are just born to write. She weaves from one perspective to another so seamlessly that if you don't pay attention, you'll find yourself miles away from where you first started. There were many times where I had to read back paragraphs just to catch the exact moment when the point of view shifted. Add to this her almost meandering prose and you have an atmospheric novel that feels almost inaccessible. I say inaccessible but Williams does make sense, it just takes a little more work to get to it (unlike Cusk who is complete gibberish to me).

The main deterrent to enjoying this novel is probably its grotesquerie.The story is set in a post-apocalyptic city. The only remaining inhabitants on earth seems to be an encampment with the matriarch, who intends to repopulate the earth in her own image, and her children. The necessity of incestuous relationships breeds a new set of humans who grow ever stranger and ungovernable to her. The matriarch's children are cruel, almost devoid of any humanity, yet we see them navigate the incomprehensibility of an empty world, a world without a god, none of the old world ethics and norms to guide them, and somehow they feel almost familiar. Their search for meaning is not unfamiliar to us. The matriarch mirrors this desire for meaning in her desperate belief that there are other encampments like theirs.

No, it would never be like that. She was desperate. She wanted to discover a pattern that would ave her, and thinking like this was dangerous and superstitious, because if the years after the disaster had shown her anything it was that nothing was connected, nothing could be made to cohere except through the objective trickery of her own actions, the real-world imposition of her belief or will, which was by no means necessary, and so she couldn't allow herself to weaken, to start perceiving meaning where there was none, to surrender the grueling, imaginative labour of keeping them afloat, the family going - life's venture! She couldn't allow herself to forget that they were alone, nothing else out there, nothing but the mask of her paranoia and the slow drip of her isolation, and the threat that faced them was not the threat she had dreamed up at all but something else altogether, something more entrenched and far more fatal [...]

Lately, I have been trying to unscramble my own feelings towards my mother, family and what it means to love them when you also feel caged and smothered. In reading The Doloriad, there are odd moments when I see myself and my own mother. Perhaps this is a personal reading, informed by my current personal circumstances. I would love to read this again when I have understood more of myself.

Possession is an interesting mix of romance, poetry and detective story. Two scholars, Roland and Maud, are thrown into a hunt to uncover the lost history between two Victorian poets. The situation gets more complicated as they try to keep their discovery a secret while also grappling with their own complicated feelings. As the title suggests, much of the novel is tries to grapple with the idea of possession:

• Possession in romantic love/the fear of being owned (The desire to be their own independent person, uninfluenced by a man in a severely patriarchal society manifests as an aversion or wariness to men, even as one desires their company. Feeling tiny in the presence of someone you love who is nonetheless so much bigger and influential than you, being entirely too conscious of the class disparity and feeling inadequate to 'possess'.)
• The desire to own everything or feel entitled to own something of the historical figure that you have spent years analyzing and studying
• Ownership of letters, which will determine how the historical knowledge within those letters will be distributed 
• Feeling possessive of someone who is supposed to share the same worldview as you 

While it can be read as a traditional romance, so much of it is also about how one thinks about the concept of love itself. Is it necessary to forego it in the interest of maintaining your selfhood? Does love necessarily mean giving up part of yourself? I think this is the heart of the Byatt's Possession. Most interestingly, she does not limit herself to romantic love. The novel is filled with characters who have a singular purpose, a lifetime's worth of dedication to a Victorian poet. This love for the poet, be it Henry Ash or Christabel LaMotte, has led them to analyze and investigate everything about them but leaves little room for looking into themselves. Who are they without the poets they so fastidiously study? 

I was quite surprised by the direction the novel took towards the end. Byatt ties up everything neatly, which I really did not expect. I thought she would leave some parts vague, if only to say "We will never know for sure" as most of historical inquiries probably go. Nevertheless, I did really enjoy it and there is a lot of satisfaction from a neatly concluded story.

I highly recommend this book. I don't think I've read anything quite like it. I will say though, if you dislike poetry then probably skip this one. I'm not much one for poetry myself and I admit the poetry bits were hard to get through. However, it did make me want to look into how to properly read poetry. It's jut a skill that I've never learned. 

I have not stopped thinking about this book ever since I finished this about a week ago. John Williams is more famous for Stoner but I think I like Butcher's Crossing more. I immediately felt the need to read Williams' other book, Augustus and in the introduction to this book, Mendelsohn says that,

All of Williams' work is preoccupied by the way in which, whatever our characters may be, the lives we end up with are the often unexpected products of the friction between us and the world itself. [...]

[...] the friction between "force of person" and "accident of fate" becomes, more often than not, erosion: a process that can blur the image we had of who we are, revealing in its place a stranger."

In Butcher's Crossing, the protagonist, Will Andrews, leaves Harvard to get to know the country. He travels to Butcher's Crossing and was introduced to Miller . At the time the book is set, Andrews is a little late to the hunt. There are very few buffalo left, their population drastically reduced by thoughtless hunting. However, Miller claims that he knows of a place which he believes is untouched by other hunters and he can take Andrews there if he agrees to finance the hunt and let Miller call the shots. Andrews agrees and the story takes us with their crew of four people as they embark on a seemingly futile journey.

It's incomprehensible how these men can stomach what they do. The slaughter seems borne out of machismo rather than any actual need for the buffalo hide. What does Andrews hope to gain from this experience? Was anything like he ever expected? There is a pervading sense of emptiness in the novel, from the characters who seek fulfillment but cannot attain it, and from the whole situation which feels hopeless and meaningless. As a reader, you are torn between awaiting for something bad to happen and wanting to see their journey through.

By the end of the novel, Andrews remain just as much a stranger to us as when he started. He does not know himself and his experience has not wiped away his emptiness. Even Andrews himself does not recognize who he is because despite going out of his way to understand the country, he didn't really attempt to get to know it, much less the creatures that roam it.

It seemed to him that he had not really thought of the buffalo before. He had skinned them by the hundreds, he had killed a few; he had eaten of their flesh, he had smelled their stench, he had been immersed in their blood, but he had not thought of them before as he was thinking of them now.

Butcher's Crossing gives one with so much to think about. Williams' writing cuts out anything superfluous and it feels like every line bears weight. I am excited to read Augustus next. 

Jack is the latest installment in the Gilead series. I'm unsure if it's the last one but even if Robinson were to write a new one, I think my own journey stops here. I absolutely love Gilead but the succeeding books don't quite live up to it. Because Jack became such an intriguing character in the first book, I really anticipated finally knowing his side of the story. Why was he so disliked and considered problematic by the John Ames? Why did Lila feel a kinship with him? Instead of going straight to Jack's story, however, we had to read about Glory and Lila first. While I appreciated how Robinson crafted characters with so much depth, a part of me also felt that the middle two books were a little superfluous because I was judging it based on how much information it provided on Jack's backstory (aside from Home, not much). After reading Jack, I am left asking myself why I invested so much of my curiosity in him.

There are a lot of things that can be said about Jack's character but I think foremost, for me, would be how incomprehensible he is. He seems thoroughly convinced that he has an evil nature and it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. His preoccupation with ethics and faith affects how he moves through life and his relationships with other people. One thing that he keeps talking about is "harmlessness". He says that this is a thing he is striving for. This isn't the kind of harmlessness in which he doesn't cause anyone suffering but rather the kind of harmlessness in which he doesn't affect anyone's life in any way, a kind of non-life where his actions don't cause anything, good or bad, to others.

He was struggling in a web of interrelation, setting off consequences in every direction that he could not predict or control or even imagine with any hope of approaching the truth of a matter.

This all breaks down when he falls in love with Della, a colored woman. Segregation makes their relationship illegal and he causes a world of trouble to Della and her family. He learns the hard way that it is impossible for him to go through life as completely "harmless". Jack and Della's relationship is tragic. It baffles me that there was a time when you couldn't marry someone simply because of race. Jack has to make the terrible choice of how he can show his loyalty to Della. Does he stay with her or leave? Both choices will end up hurting her in different ways. It's an awful choice to make. However, it is a little hard to root for them because Jack is quite unlikable. He can't keep a steady job, he's prone to petty theft and he drinks a lot. What does Della see in him? I know she mentions his soul but that seems a little trite. 

Even though I enjoyed reading about Jack's philosophical musings, I think I just had questions that remained unanswered. I still didn't understand how Jack could get under John Ames' skin so much. He's not a good guy, sure, but honestly, he doesn't seem to deserve so much ire either. On the opposite vein, I also didn't understand how Della could be so committed to him. He is hardly the ideal man, certainly not someone you would sacrifice your future for. If I had let go of this desire to understand Jack maybe this would have been a better book for me. 

Morrison really is for more mature readers. I first read this when I was younger and I couldn't appreciate it. Reading it now as a (slightly) more mature reader, I find that there is so much packed into such a tiny book and even then, I still find that I need more knowledge and experience to fully appreciate this novel. I usually don't look into the author's writing process or the analyses of other readers but this time around I looked up reviews and watched some Morrison interviews. I must say that doing so really allows you to bask in the afterglow of finishing a good novel. There were some parts of Sula that I was initially uncertain about but which I now find to be indispensable in the novel. I'd love to continue this practice of looking into the "behind the scenes" of a novel to really understand it.

I think more than anything, Sula has opened my mind to a different way of reading. There are "unrealistic" elements in an otherwise realistic story that could throw you off if you don't examine it closely. It reminds me of the lessons George Saunders mentions in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain that everything in the story must advance the plot in a non-trivial way. In Morrison's Sula, you have to constantly be asking yourself why the events are presented in this way or why the characters act the way they do. Otherwise, you may finish the book with a distaste for Sula the character. After all, Sula is a remarkably unrealistic and unlikable character. Why is Sula unlikable? Why does Nell appear to the reader as the "good person"? Why do we think this?

In Sula, the meaning you associate with one thing is constantly being challenged. National Suicide Day may initially sound like a badly-worded holiday to bring awareness to the importance of mental health but it is a "holiday" founded by Shadrack to release him of the burden of the surprise of death. He calls for a single day in which people can die without frightening him of its unexpectedness. By the end of the novel, several people die unexpectedly in an accident brought on by the mania of participating in the march for National Suicide Day. Fire featured twice in the novel and is related both times to love even as it ends in death: Eva burning her son to save him from himself and Eva jumping off a window in an attempt to save Hannah from burning to death. Perhaps the most jarring is Nell, who is presented as the "good" one, is revealed to have felt excited, almost relishing, at the drowning of Chicken Little. Unlikable Sula who is an independent and modern woman (characteristics that are typically touted as objectively good by modern standards) dies by the end of the book having lost a man she attempted to keep by being traditional and having lost her only friend.

Even Morrison finds Sula a deplorable character. In an interview, she has this to say about Sula as a character:

I suppose The Bluest Eye was about one’s dependence on the world for identification, self-value, feelings of worth. Whereas I wanted to explore something quite different in Sula, where you have a woman who is whimsical, who depends on her own instincts. Both exaggerations I find deplorable, but my way is to push anything out to the edge, to see of what it is really made, so that Sula would be ‘a free woman.' There’s a lot of danger in that, you know, because you don’t have commitments, and you don’t feel that connection. I think freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.

This feels very different from the contemporary idea of 'feminism' in which a woman does not owe anyone anything. On the surface this reads like an empowering statement but it is steeped in solipsism. Society needs responsibilities to function. But as Morrison says, this only works if we get to freely choose what to be responsible for. This also loosely reminds me of the scene in Gerwig's Little Women (2019) in which Jo laments the seemingly dichotomous view of women as either only fit for love or smart and don't desire love.

It's simultaneously scary and exciting that Sula is one of Morrison's most accessible books. I would love to read her more challenging books but I am also worried that it will fly over my head.

I recently finished two books back-to-back and since I don't really have much to say about the both of them, I've decided to merge them into one post.

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

I picked this book up at random on my sister's shelf. I've never heard of it before (although I have read the author's previous work, The English Patient) and I don't think even my sister has read it. I looked it up on goodreads where it had a pretty average rating. There is nothing to recommend it to me but since it's a thin book and I have nothing on my TBR, I decided to just go with it. I cannot say in all honesty that I can make a good case for this book. I read it with barely any understanding as to what was going on. There were some really great lines but overall, it did nothing for me. Although its an interesting premise for a book, the delivery just didn't work for me. The timeline and points of view jump around too much and there wasn't enough time to really care about any of the characters due to the shortness of the book. I wonder if the difficulty I had with reading it was a me problem or if the text just really didn't make much sense. Most of the time it felt like I was just continuing to read it for the sake of finishing it, comprehension be damned.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guinn

I started this a long time ago on my kindle. However, as is the case with most of my kindle reads, it tends to fall by the wayside since I only ever use my kindle when I'm bored at work. I enjoyed reading it and I am willing to continue reading the other books in the series. However, I do recommend reading it more consistently than I did. I think my enjoyment of it was lessened significantly by the fact that whole weeks would go by before I pick it up again. I really should be more conscientious about the books that I read. I feel that it's unfair for the author who has worked so hard to create a good story. I don't know if the succeeding stories will feature the same characters but I really wish it will because Ged is the perfect protagonist. He started out as a very confident, borderline cocky, young boy and the story consistently moves towards his growth. I especially loved the conclusion of him facing his own shadow. I think it subverts the fantasy trope of fighting an evil who is separate from you, an 'other' that has nothing to do with you except as an enemy.