Archives de catégorie : What I have read

What I have read

#4205 what I have read ?

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photo: Hydra, at the end of a path, a kind of summary of life.

The question mark comes from the fictional void that I am going through at the moment. I have not managed to finish the fiction book I started reading quite some time ago. I still read, only differently. These days, articles that I find here and there on blame and responsibility, the need to deconstruct one’s own story and the one that is sometimes imposed on us by those around us or our social environment. All this with the aim of lightening the mind. But before getting there, you have to agree to embark on narrow and unknown paths that sometimes make you dizzy.

What I have read

#4162 What I have read : Nathan Hill, Wellness

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photo: Spring in Nelson

Nathan Hill, Wellness, 2023, Picador, 597p.

The main characters of the story are called Elizabeth and Jack. They meet in Chicago, at the beginning of the Internet. Jack is a photographer, Elizabeth is a psychologist, or something like that. The reader follows their evolution until they have a child (until he is about ten years old), Toby, and, finally, buy an apartment in Chicago.

Between the starting point and the end point, we learn where they come from: Jack from a family of farmers on the prairies, Elizabeth from a very wealthy family. They met in Chicago, when they are both trying to escape their families, although for different reasons. Hill gives them the floor, each in turn, as well as to their respective families and in doing so addresses many themes such as art, more specifically photography, the beauty of the prairies, which he speaks about at length in a moving, fair, and sensitive way, the difficulty of escaping one’s past, motherhood, Facebook algorithms, the invasion of our lives by apps, the notion of well-being or the chaos of our times among other things.

This author writes extremely well while being easy to read and often funny. He manages to talk about delicate subjects (male desire in a feminist world or swinging, while avoiding falling in all possible traps). It is obvious that his writing is based on research but, unlike many books I have read in recent years, the research he conducted to nourish his writing blends into the voices of the characters, instead of leaving a bad taste of « copy and paste » that comes from Wikipedia.

Yes, I found the chapters on Facebook algorithms tedious, otherwise, the 597 pages of reading (notwithstanding the many acknowledgements and very long bibliography) are worth it. It was practically impossible to arrive at an ending that would surpass the beautiful moments of the reading and one cannot therefore blame him for letting the reader down a little at the end. A singular voice in the landscape of the novel, very much in tune with our times. Definitely worth reading.

literature, What I have read

4096 what I’ve read : Edward St-Aubyn

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Photo: abandoned boat in Pohara, like the poor little Patrick of the story

St-Aubyn, Edward, Patrick Melrose, Novels, 2012, Picador, 680p.

I bought this very lengthy book in English, a few years ago, after watching the TV series, Patrick Melrose, whose main character was masterfully played by Dominic Cumberbatch,  impersonating  an addict .

I didn’t know much at the time about Edward St-Aubyn, but the series had got me interested  and  when I found this book at the Nelson  Book Fair, I felt like giving it a go. What a good idea it was  because the book, covered a lot more than the series, in fact,  four of the five novels in the Patrick Melrose saga: Never mind,  Bad News, Some hope and Mother’s Milk, so much more than the series, which focused on Bad News.

The complete book (minus the last book, At last) brings together four semi-autobiographical novels by the author, who grew up in the modern British aristocracy, and  deals with, in addition to a merciless description of this privileged society,  the permanent evil caused by incest, child abuse,  drug abuse and addiction.

In Never mind, he action takes place in a mountain village in the South-east of France, in the family’s summer residence, when Patrick  is 5 years old. His terribly cruel father and gentle alcoholic mother welcome several guests to a dinner party. We are also presented, as a bonus,  the state of mind of the British aristocracy (quite fascinating) and the courage of Patrick Melrose/Edward St-Aubyn, who faces his father to stop the abuse. In  Bad News, Patrick is a 25-year-old heroin addict. Over a period of 24 hours, we see Patrick coming to New York to collect his father’s ashes and in the process provides  the reader with  a very fine depiction of the mindset of an addict.  After All is set in England a few years later, before and during a social party. Patrick struggles to stay clean and confides his shameful secret to his best friend, reflects on his relationship with his father and observes the haughty, superficiality and cruelty of the British high society. Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess  Margaret,  makes an appearance in an unflattering role.

Mother’s milk, unlike the first 3, takes place over several years. Patrick’s 2 sons were born. For the most part, Patrick is  self-absorbed, drunk and on painkillers. His mother has given  most of Patrick’s inheritance to her spiritual guide.

Each of the novels can be read independently, fortunately, since  I read it over several months (or years?) because, when I receive a book from the library, I drop everything else  to finish it quickly. Each novel is relatively short, apart from the last one,  and I found it easy to get back into the story,  also thanks to the images  from TV series. This book opened the doors to a world about which I know nothing, in fact, and the detachment and humor of the author, combined with a very beautiful style, made the experience very interesting. I will not forget his reflections on his relationship with his father, particularly his indulgence and his detachment.  The French translation contains the fifth book and who knows, maybe I will find it this year at the used book fair.

What I have read

4089 what I have read : Nathan Hill

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photo : dreamy cormorant in Marahau (windy gardens), sand bar

Hill, Nathan, The Nix,  Knopf, 2016, 752p. Yes, you read correctly, 720 pages!

Nathan Hill is a  newcomer on the American literary scene (and worldwide, since the book has been translated into 30 languages) was  published in 2016.   Nix refers to a Norwegian legend which seems to be the key to the story but  delivered at the very end. It is impossible to summarize a 752 page book in a few lines, but one can try: a presidential candidate has been attacked in public by a woman in her sixties: Faye Andresen-Anderson. Samuel Anderson, English teacher and Shakespeare specialist, is not aware of this event spread across social medias because he is busy playing  The World of Elfscape online. The woman in question happens to be  his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child. Having nonetheless become a promising writer, after the publication of a short story, he got  a substantial advance for his next book, of which he still has not written a line, but he spent the advance  money.

This starting point is the pretext that Hill uses to talk about the difficulty of living and growing up in the United States especially, or elsewhere for that matter, through two generations, his own and that of his mother, and to a certain point, that of his grandfather too, although this angle was not developed to the same extent. I can understand he had to stop at some point, because it would probably have taken a hundred more pages to treat this subject with the detail that Hill showed elsewhere and then, really, but no, that would have been too much. This is nevertheless a little disappointing because the title makes us think that everything starts from Norway, when the grandfather left Norway to emigrate to the United States, when in fact, the novel really focuses on the following generations.

This book could easily have bored me to death. The first chapter takes us into the head of an online video game player and I was tempted to say no thanks, I don’t particularly want to know what’s going on in there. We then dive into the childhood and adolescence of Samuel Anderson and again, fortunately he changes the subject, just as I am about to give up. There’s a limit to my desire to know what’s going on in someone’s head, and having already recently delved into Jon Fosse’s book and Gerald Munrane’s book, I couldn’t cope with too much more of that. I still managed to get through these moments that were a little too detailed for my liking because he writes really very well and he has a sense of humour. What kept me going, however, was the chapter where Samuel Anderson calls a student into his office to tell her that she cheated and that her assignment will be a failure. The student doesn’t see it that way and she will end up winning her case, but the reader has the pleasure of seeing how  this result can be achieved  and get the teacher fired as a bonus. Obviously, this made me laugh because it reminded me of my academic  life, which I would not now want to return to under any circumstances. Otherwise, the book goes in all directions: political history, media influence, addiction, unhappy childhood, military life and so on. However, even if the book is very, very well written and often amusing, it seems to me once again (this is not the first time I have said it) that the book would have benefited from some cuts. Or, if I had been Hill’s editor, I would have suggested that he cut some unnecessarily detailed passages to better develop the grandfather’s story, which really left me wanting more.

But the book left me wanting to read more from him, when his next book (624  pages this time) arrives at the library (hopefully I am not too far on the waiting list).

author, literature, What I have read

#4068 what I have read: Deborah Levy

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photo : encountering beauty on Pohara beach. Population : 560
Deborah Levy. Real Estate,  published in English in 2021, the third volume of the trilogy of her  » living autobiography », as she calls it. I talked about the first volume elsewhere, and the second  is not in the library at the moment. She takes stock of her life, close to her sixtieth birthday , as her daughters prepare to leave their London apartment. The English title emphasizes one part of the book, where she mentions her dream house. She wonders what is a home, or why, while she is a recognized author, translated into several languages, she still cannot afford to own a house, what she would like to find in it if she had one, where she would like it to be, etcetera. That was what intrigued me about this book, because it is a theme rarely discussed. However, the book  is as much and perhaps even more a kind of daydreaming rather than a biography. A critic has said elsewhere that no one, better than Levy, knows how to talk about the everyday, essentially feminine, and that as such she describes what it means to be a woman and this is  mainly what it is :  a collection of her thoughts about her encounters, objects that are part of her life (shoes, among others), observations about strangers or neighbours, her friends, certain details of her daily life, her childhood memories,   her mother and, ultimately, the female condition. The quality of the writing makes it worth reading,  but  because the English title promised me something else,  I kind of lost interest because of the expectations I had. The French title fits much better with what is in the book, far from the idea of biography I had.
I then tried reading one of his novels, August Blue, but I took a dislike to the theme after a few pages and have given up for the moment. I will perhaps try The man who saw everything later, which was shortlisted (I think) for the Booker. And I hope that the library will soon bring in the second book of the trilogy, which will perhaps interest me more.