Archives par mot-clé : reading

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.

article, author, What I have read

#4022What I have read : Deborah Levy

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But before I get to Levy, a few other books I have read in the last few months 

David Lodge: Paradise News (1991), bought at last year's Nelson second-hand book fair. The back cover presents the book to us with a reflection on the notion of paradise, a description that is quite accurate. I know the author for his books on academia and he always makes me laugh or smile. Even in this book, which takes place a long way from the academic world (Hawaii, in this case), he manages to infiltrate an academic who reflects on mass tourism and its evils. I liked the book even if the last part is a bit lost.

Isabelle Allende: Violeta (2022), offered by LG. A book that examines the life of a centenarian, Violeta Del Valle, born in 1920. It begins with the description of the Spanish flu and one really wonders if it is 1920 or 2020. It then guides the reader in the intricacies of the story of a woman, her emotions and her country, wealth, poverty, the loss of loved ones and love. I liked the book, but now I don't know if I want to read any more. Not for the moment. 
John Banville: The lock-up (2023), courtesy of LG. This book is part of the Detective Benjamin Black series, which Banville first wrote under a pen name, before reverting to his own. I had read April in Spain (the previous one, published in 2021), but his most recent one is more successful in my opinion. For lovers of detective stories seasoned with the best Banville has to offer. 

As for Deborah Levy's book, What I don't want to know 2018 (borrowed from Nelson's library, now 70% open!), it is the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy by the author from South Africa living in Britain since the age of nine. She wrote this book to answer the question about why she writes. It was during a trip to Mallorca that she seems to have found the answer to this question. As soon as she arrived, she started remembering her childhood in South Africa, her father imprisoned for three years because he supported the ANC, which forced the family to emigrate to Britain when he was released from prison, after he was no longer able work. I appreciated her beautiful writing more inspiring when she leaves the facts behind, and found the beginning and the end  particularly powerful. I still want to read the following two books of the trilogy and maybe some of her fiction as well. The following sentence touched me deeply: "The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves”.
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.