Archives par mot-clé : literature

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.

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).

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#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.

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#4061 What I have read : Eleanor Catton

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I finally got tempted by Eleanor Catton ‘s most recent book , “ Birnam Wood”, published in 2023, around ten years after The Luminaries which earned her the “Booker” for a book of more than eight hundred pages, which I didn’t like very much. Still, I  read it all, forcing myself to read about ten pages before falling asleep and even today, it’s a bad memory. So I hesitated before starting to read her latest publication, but the fact that this time there were only four hundred and some pages helped me take the plunge and I also was attracted to the topic . This time Catton wrote a  psychological or political thriller that draws attention to the impasses of nowadays politics.

The first protagonist is Birnam Wood, an activist collective based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its founder, Mira Bunting , dreams of radical, widespread and lasting social change; To achieve this, the members of Birnam Wood engage in a sort of gardening guerrilla, reclaiming unused public and private land for cultivation. The other protagonist of  the novel, Robert Lemoine, is an Americain billionaire. He has officially come to New Zealand to build himself a bunker in anticipation of a catastrophic event. In reality he digs the New Zealand earth to extract billions of dollars of rare earths in a national park.

The two meet and soon, Mira believes she can use Robert Lemoine’s money and land to carry out her mission, while Robert Lemoine wants to use Birnam Wood to camouflage his operations. We also meet Tony Gallo, a young idealistic journalist, as well as a recently knighted New Zealand businessman, Sir Owen Darvish, and his wife.

The first half of the novel puts all the elements of the story in place and it’s actually my favourite part. Catton displays a light sense of humour that I hadn’t felt in the previous book. It seems to me that she is  settling scores, to a certain extent with New Zealand, where she was criticized extensively after the publication of The Luminaries , among other things, because she was not shy about her criticism of New Zealand. The Prime Minister at the time did not particularly like it and the quarrel escalated to the point where her father (a lecturer at the University of Canterbury where I worked at the time) felt the need to publicly demand that  we stop harassing his daughter (as far as I’m concerned, it’s more the dad’s intervention that I found irritating).  She enjoys  making fun of the increasingly ridiculous honours that are awarded indiscriminately to just about anyone. They disappeared for a while, but the aforementioned Prime Minister restored them so he could become a Sir himself! Since then, we have rewarded just about anyone for just about anything and it has become a joke, I completely agree with Catton. Other criticisms of New Zealand, however, sometimes seem unfair to me when it asserts that certain behaviours are typical of New Zealanders  when in fact it is typical human pettiness or jealousy. For instance, if we except the United States (but maybe it is an outdated  and unfair cliche), where becoming rich is seen as a clear sign of success, billionaires are not  particularly popular in most countries, I would say. She also mentions a negative attitude towards people who live abroad for some time, a lack of curiosity, anger from the family sometime also, but I have experienced the same (I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in twenty years and she asked me one question, the rest of the two hours was devoted to herself. Not that I particularly enjoy being the centre of attention, in fact it is quite the opposite, but I was impressed by the lack of curiosity and the indifference). It does not seem to me to be a New Zealand thing.

I found the second part less interesting, it seemed to fall back into the habits that had annoyed me in the previous book with useless descriptions. That being said, it’s a thought I have almost every time I have read a book recently, where I find long unnecessary passages that I would have eliminated (do we do this to give the reader more bang for their buck? ?). I particularly appreciated that she gently made fun of activists and billionaires with a certain lightness. It also raises essential questions about the type of world we are building (or enduring). I found the ending disappointing, but that ‘s also been the case for quite a while with most of the books I read (or TV shows I watch).

The book will no doubt be translated into French soon , but for those who read a little English, it reads quite well. I read it in a week when I was in Pohara .

What I have read

#3050 what I have read (Ernest Hemingway)

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Photo: Santa Teresa Gallura, Sardinia


For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). There are already many scholarly reviews of this book by Hemingway, considered by some to be his best, strongly inspired by his work as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War,  atmosphere of which he recreates with great conviction. I will content myself with sharing my impressions of Robert Jordan, an American university professor, joining the International Brigades, on a mission to blow up a bridge. We follow him for three days as he lives with a group of anti-fascist supporters to prepare for his offensive, falls in love with Maria and does not survive the attack.

It took me a long time to finish this book, I could only read a few pages at a time, probably because of its density. I was interested in learning more about Hemingway's "iceberg" style, where one mentions  only a small part of one's characters, while one must,  according to Hemingway, know them thoroughly. His advice suggests that the quality of a book comes from the capacity of its author to cut long passages, which he definitely did not hesitate to do, with great success. I feel like I know Robert Jordan, Maria and the others, even if the author only introduces us to certain aspects of their lives. I did not ask myself, while reading this book, as I have often enough in my recent readings, why the editor had not suggested cutting certain passages (must one nowadays have enough pages for one's money? am I wondering). Despite what one might call, a lack of detail, I found a lot of humanity, love, suffering, pain, violence, as well as  reflections on the value of life and death, deep questions that touched me a lot.

Obviously, there will surely be someone, somewhere, who will find, sooner or later, that this book is too much  this or not enough that, that it does not reflect our times, because the words or the story do not suit  our way of thinking, to which I would reply that therein lies the interest of the book, because it allows us to paint  an era, to which we can compare ourselves to measure the progress made, the evolution (or lack of it, for that matter) of values ​​and  more. Words, stories that were written at a certain time, reflect the mentality of the time and that's it. There is nothing to add or take away, and changing a story to appeal to today's readership, as some editors have done recently, seems unacceptable to me.