OKAAAAY, okay. I usually save all my book stuff for the end-of-year roundup, but I was aware that it was kind of douche-y not to name the books. Also, there are five of them, so it makes a Five for Friday post!
1. The one I hated: Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza. I'm not saying it's a bad book. Whether it was just not the book for me or it was the wrong time, I just didn't like it. I don't love when authors play with the whole fiction/non-fiction thing, making themselves a character in the book, although I know some people love it - it just seems a little cheesy to me "Oh, I found this manuscript in an ancient locked trunk" or "Oh, I'm telling this like a story but it's really all true". I am often okay with an experimental format. I probably would have been more into this when I was younger and in graduate school and more open to non-traditional literature that took work and even then left me confused. She is a celebrated author but it read to me a bit like a new writer who is excited about all these new techniques she can use. It just ended up in a whirl of detached penises and shrinking women and detectives who did psychology or maybe psychologists who investigated crimes, and I struggled to finish it.
2. The one that I didn't love as much as the hype indicated I should: Raising Hare: a Memoir by Chloe Dalton. Listen. This was perfectly lovely. I am really happy that the author had an up close and personal encounter with a natural creature during the shitstorm that was Covid. I learned some cool stuff about hares and I absolutely believe that caring for and being engaged with nature in this way is transforming.
I'm just also kind of cynical and snarky, so I was a tiny bit annoyed by how there seemed to be an implication that this has never happened to anyone in quite this way EVER BEFORE. It also seemed ever so slightly like parlaying a lovely experience into a book deal, with some places that seemed pretty padded. A magazine article would have been perfectly adequate. She also goes on quite a bit about how careful she is not to make the hare or its leverets pets, and it's true she doesn't name them or put little hats on them or whatever, but obviously she doesn't just leave them to the vagaries of actual nature either, or there would be no story. There is contact between her and the hares. She bottle-feeds a leveret and the hares 'lollop around her house' and one gives birth in her study. She intervenes to preserve their health and life - and that's great! I'm sure I would have done the same!
There's also a point beyond which you have to examine your own hypocrisy because she is suddenly fairly disparaging of farming or building practices that endanger wildlife, but I'm willing to bet she was still shopping for food at a supermarket, and well....
”If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’, then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty" - she says this as if it's brand new information when surely it is not? Anyway, most of the world lost their collective mind over how great this book was, so clearly I'm just an asshole, this we all know.
3. The one I admired intellectually although it didn't bowl me over emotionally: Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer. I must have read about this on the library website and requested it. It's a tiny little thing. I read it before refreshing my memory about it, and my thoughts were that it reminded me of Romantic literature in a kind of archaic way - people said things 'coldly', things were called 'repellent', people would get pale and be suffering which would make them attractive, there were sleeping powders. It reminded me of The Sorrows of Young Werther and Remembrance of Things Past. The writing style was very detached but also sketched a vivid picture of both the action and the interior lives of these people, none of whom were very likable (which is fine, it's not a thing that I require of books I like, I know some people do, zero judgment). When I finished it I looked up its provenance and discovered that it was a reprint of a 1950s book by an Austrian author, which made a lot of sense. It was tiny little thing with a lot of impact packed into its compact form.
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4. The one I really liked: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. The writer has been on my radar for a long time, but I didn't manage to read Babel, so the only other book of hers I've read is Yellowface, which I liked but it seemed like a bit of a throwaway compared to her other books, like she had this thought and tossed it off in a weekend because she is a brilliant achievement machine, she has multiple degrees and has won numerous awards for her multitude of books and she's not even thirty, which is totally fine and doesn't at all make me feel like an utter failure at life who might as well just find an ice floe to drift away on. I usually roll my eyes at the "this book meets this book" descriptions of a new book, but I have to admit that "Dante's Inferno meets Susannah Clarke's Piranesi (which I also loved)" is kind of perfect in this case.
I read most of this one while sitting on my patio in the summer - it is big but so propulsive it felt like it took no time to read.
I loved the magic system - the chalk and the trying to distract the world for just a fleeting moment. Alice was annoying and kind of a pick-me, but that was the whole point, and her conflict about this was really, really well portrayed, I thought. Also there is a misunderstanding that leads to drawn-out bad feelings, and often I find this dumb and annoying, but here it made sense and worked for me. And the connection between hell and university? The feverish competition, the spending of all your physical and mental and emotional resources on a success that might never materialize? The worshipping of figures that sometimes turn out to be detestable fiends? Oh hell yes. Very much enjoyed.
(Katabasis is a Greek word that means 'descent into the underworld', and opinions about how to pronounce it seem to vary, with 'Ka-TA-ba-sis' maybe pulling slightly ahead, but 'Ka-ta-BA-sis' also not being completely wrong.)
5. The one I loved: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. I discovered SGJ in 2015 and have scooped up everything that comes across my radar ever since. When my friend Nat (HI NAT) requested The Only Good Indian on my recommendation and then of course couldn't remember why it came up, she was expecting a book on residential schools and instead got this - 'violent, vengeful horror', which fortunately she liked. He writes horror that has a strong underpinning of social criticism, related to colonialism, systemic racism and generational trauma - but around this he constructs well-crafted and really frightening, really effective stories.
When Nat said in our book bingo group that she was reading this one because Obama had it on his summer reading list, I jokily but huffily reminded her that I discovered the author and recommended it to her years before, and said Obama has a lot going for him, he could let me have this. Somewhat amusingly, then, I found the first 80 pages or so a bit of a slog. But once I slipped into the deeply-carved ruts of it, I couldn't look away.
His books and short stories are scary, yes. They have some bleak humour sometimes. They are also often very sad. The vampire trope can be used so many ways, and here the central tragedy of Good Stab being transformed is that it separates him from his tribe in a way that can't be repaired. The self-loathing and despair of the Lutheran pastor who is told the story by Good Stab in drawn-out spates, is deeply felt also. This book illustrates the way the forming of a country is nearly always tangled inextricably with appalling incidents and weak justifications. This one has really stayed with me.
So there you go. I would say one, two, three, four and five stars respectively but that would be fudging it a little. I liked Raising Hare just fine, just thought the praise was a little overly effusive. So probably one, three, three and a half, four, and four and a half (I didn't love the framing device for TBHH). Have a great weekend!
