February Roundup
The Four Chambered Heart - Anaïs Nin
J R - William Gaddis
Água Viva - Clarice Lispector
Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker
A Spy in the House of Love - Anaïs Nin
Poor Things - Alasdair Gray
The Time of Indifference - Alberto Moravia
The Flight of the Falcon - Daphne du Maurier
Several shorties, one behemoth, and a handful of what I’d somewhat arbitrarily regard as “normal” novels. Came into the month just a few days off finishing Gaddis’s colossal The Recognitions, which was one of my most intensely affecting reading experiences of all time. During the thick of that experience, and even within a few days afterwarrd, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it—the highs were high, but the lows were pretty frustrating, and the density so often veered into conspicuous self-indulgence that I struggled to even answer that ostensibly simple question: did I like it?
Well, as more time has passed, I think I can finally and confidently answer that one with an emphatic: YES. Melodrama notwithstanding, the whirlwind of emotions experienced throughout that active reading process continued swirling around long after finishing (proper tense there should actually be continues swirling around) and I really would say that with each week since putting it down, I’m more impressed by it—and honestly, not in an über pretentious literary sense. The Recognitions continues to sit with me like a life experience, a crazy infuriating rewarding gauntlet that I can’t imagine having gone without. I really think that two or three of my favorite scenes I’ve ever read are contained within that cool thousand page tome. Anyway, though these two leading paragraphs may suggest otherwise, I actually do not set out to simply review that novel or its author, but to explain why/how on earth I so quickly leapt into his second hulking heap of pages—J R. I felt like I had no choice, and I do not regret it! While certainly less emotionally affecting than The Recognitions, I found J R to be hilarious through and through, and the underlying brunt of the satire (moneymoneymoney) made more intuitive sense to me than the religious undercurrents of The Recognitions. ~1,750 pages into his oeuvre, Gaddis has undeniably infiltrated my top… ten? Five? author list—an esteemed place to be, undeniably.
MOVING ON! Perhaps it’s not surprising that I had to mostly surround these two bricks with slimmer stuff. The Four Chambered Heart started off feeling like my favorite of Nin’s ongoing Cities of the Interior, but lost steam for me roughly two-thirds in, and jumping to much later in the month, I felt similarly about A Spy in the House of Love. Admittedly, I felt similarly about volume 2 as well back in January, altogether making me come to the weirdly reluctant conclusion that I don’t really love this work in its totality, despite finding Ladders to Fire an absolute stunner, and continuing to find enough gems tucked elsewhere to sustain my general admiration for Nin’s writing. I will likely not read the fifth and final installment for a little while—perhaps sometime in April?—because I worry that, counterintuitively, it does not really serve the work well to barrel through it.
Água Viva was certainly an interesting experience. Though not my first Lispector, it was my first in many years, and my general awareness of the freeform nature of this particular work cushioned what I would imagine may otherwise have been a deflating state of malaise. That said, don’t get me wrong—this little nugget is replete with gorgeous passages and reflections, and I would highly recommend it for anyone who is specifically looking for freeform philosophical musing—I’m just not often looking for that!
Blood and Guts in High School really did not work for me. From a vaguely academic/historical perspective I understand the significance of the work, and remain curious about Acker’s other ventures into pastiche, but I did not enjoy this reading experience at all. Thankfully, the trio of works I wrapped the month with completely made up for those couple days of disinterest: Poor Things, The Time of Indifference, and The Flight of the Falcon. Poor Things + Alasdair Gray are going through an admittedly somewhat obnoxious explosion of internet attention in the wake of the film’s success, so I approached the novel with a mixture of interest and caution, and it totally exceeded my expectations. Gray has what I believe to be a whimsical and inherently self-satirizing nature about him, one in which he manages to make himself or his stand-ins the butt of the holisitc joke, though I should also acknowledge that perhaps I’m simply granting him that pass for what otherwise could reasonably be aruged as a smattering of problematic perspectives. I’m currently about halfway through LANARK, which seems to be regarded as his masterpiece, and though now’s not the time to dig deeply into that, it’s feeling like it’ll be an all timer for me, and I’m incredibly grateful that Gray was foisted onto my radar through his present status in the macro-culture.
The Time of Indifference and The Flight of the Falcon both take place in midcentury Italy, which is frankly a delightful place to be (not bothering to include the 10,000 caveats that such a statement deserves). Neither were extraordinary, but I thoroughly enjoyed them both—it’s tough to distill what makes certain works feel eminently enjoyable and easily digestible for me, but I suppose the 200 - 300 page European micro-drama is just a framework I’m always happy to revisit, with Giovanni’s Room standing as perhaps the best in the bunch and even oddball entries like Tropic of Cancer and Moravia’s pithier Conjugal Love rounding out my comfort zone. I really look forward to reading more Du Maurier in the future, and I feel like whichever of Moravia’s works winds up being my favorite will also break into some sort of vague pantheon for me—there’s something about his writing that I enjoy tremendously, despite neither of the novels I’ve thus read thus far quite transcending the form. Most likely I’ll pick up one of his NYRB-affirmed alleged masterpieces next, either Boredom or Contempt.
Onward to March!