Sylvie

It is rare to have a work so deeply resonate with me and my distinct perception of the world, my autistic sense of alienation from other women and from society. I deal with so much pressure to conform to “the factory”, but it eludes me, will always elude me. I am constructed differently, constructed from the stardust of a remote galaxy. One day, perhaps, something will descend from the sky to take me home.

Perhaps it is never quite completely aging out of being that 14 year old girl haunting the local Hot Topic to the tune of Jack Off Jill, but this is one of my comfort reads. Steve Albini died today, which is acutely devastating given how profoundly Big Black informed my own music, and I couldn't focus on studying, so I took a long walk and found this in the local comic store. I've read it numerous times but never owned it, so I nabbed it, went next door to the coffee shop, and sat down with Fangs and a Latté. I'm feeling a fair bit better for having done so.

This reminded me of the much more recent novel by Sayaka Murata, Earthlings, a personal favorite and likewise pronouncedly Japanese novel on pining for a sincere expression of being. The agents of desire repression, desire for an authenticity precluded by society, are described in both via mechanistic terms, machines and factories, accompanied by a sense of such profound alienation that the narrators declare themselves inhuman. There's a Deluzian analysis of the two waiting to be exercised that I might some day undertake. There is so much to process here-I'll be sifting through the memory of many passages for months to come, I'm sure. Exceptional, and an essential read for the queer and the deviant.

Philosophies with legs, academics abstracted from academia, a fervor of dialogue and an idleness of musing, an anti-novel insistent upon self-discovery and a little man thinking himself into oblivion. Augusto strains to understand-the nature of love, of women, of self-but for all his talk-for he never ceases to talk-he manages only to, in straining for sense, leave himself senseless. At its best it brims with humorous wit, at its worst it drags with dry tedium, but it is always unique, and well worth the read. The work leaves me with the impression that if all of language is a construct, and we realize ourselves through language, then we are ourselves fictions. A book thus steeped in such linguistic self-realization really ought to be read in its own context, in its own language, but, having no intention of learning Spanish, this is the best I'll ever manage.
The letter from Eugenia is, by the way, one of the funniest missives in fiction.

It is five months into the year, and I am finishing my first book of 2024. I have taken an extended vacation from reading. Well, less a vacation, and more a tailspin into sustained but variable crisis, wherein I reserve reading for my visits to the depressive hospitalizations. The manic ones tend to not leave much room for literature. Against the Day and Earthlings were exceptional experiences, I savored both, perfect novels, but upon discharge, I did not re-engage my longstanding love for reading, because life proved consistently to overwhelm. But here I am, sitting in a crisis center, having just finished this book, and about to read Smoke and Mirrors by Gaiman, with my return to University to finish an English Literature degree three years abandoned impending, and I think I have finally struck it, the passion, the fervor, for literature. I am tumbling headlong after a long dormancy, a long but fitful sleep, into embracing words as my future, the future for which I have pined but which I have avoided for two decades. Thank you, Ottessa, for helping me wake up.

The problem with collections of this sort is how uneven they tend to be, but there are moments when Gaiman's talent shines; moments, even, of brilliance. Still, it is largely merely “pretty good” with the occasional outright misfire. I loved Neverwhere and Coraline when I was young, and this collection, while it did not bowl me over, has convinced me that I should revisit Gaiman as a novelist now, in my 30s.

Perdido Street Station was such a momentous reading experience when I was younger. It was flawed, with its occasionally unconvincing characterization, the pacing, the occasional clunkiness of the dialogue, but the way the city lived, the atmosphere, elevated it above itself. The City & The City has a hell of a premise. It has the occasional sentence that makes me envious. Occasionally I feel for the characters. But on the whole, it is unconvincing. I don't buy it. I read a line and I think, you know, that feels forced, that feels written, something someone put in this character's mouth more than what the character would say. I don't buy it. I buy his architecture and his conceits, some of his turns of phrase, but not his characters or his plots.

I've seen interviews with China and he's such an insightful, articulate speaker who clearly has a tremendous amount to offer. I have Kraken on my shelf. It might be a bit before I get to it, but I will, and I'm going to be in it with the hope of being enraptured, because China so clearly has the capacity, somewhere, to be properly enrapturing.

Here, in grief, things tumble into their constituents, into inanimacy, an unknowing, or in some instances a knowing too well that supercedes reductive language. Pride and vanity bear through carrying out a woman's revenge, one metted towards all but the man upon whom it was fixed. While it is not allotted so much direct pronouncement as other concerns, the tragedy and sorrow of womanhood is perhaps the most pronounced theme, everpresent as undercurrent, rising occasionally to wash away the bridge or drive a rushing log through the ford. After some chapters I had to set it aside and go for a walk. Impeccably written, at times genuinely visceral.