So this is an impossible little book to classify, but it’s one in which tone tone ton tells you what you need to know about it. A little town that has recently been hit with a flood, or perhaps an annual flood gone a little awry. Comyns begins us with a cryptic and wonderful image of someone rowing their way through a house. This opens up our introduction to Ebin Willoweed, the protagonist or at least head of household for this story. We go from […]
That’s how confident they are. No one would dare stand in front of our house and watch us, they think.
This novel is also of a type. I don’t know if you’ve read Jenny Offil’s Dept of Speculation or Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday, but both deal with the collapse of both long-term relationships, but also the collapse of long-term relationships in the swift succession of a partner leaving. In Offil’s, it’s for an affair with a much younger woman, which leads the narrator to focus her energies going piece by piece through the relationship in pained and sometimes funny ways. I didn’t happen to like […]
The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.
This is an interesting and touching novel by the Nobel Prize winner from 1968 Yasunari Kawabata. His win is perfectly well-deserved as he’s a great writer, but I get the sense that the Nobel committee perhaps felt like they missed their chance with Junichiro Tanizaki dying a few years earlier, not necessarily wanting to risk giving the prize to Mishima. And Kawabata became a worthy if modest prize winner. This novel is not wholly a novel, and according to the introduction, was more of a […]
Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts…
This a deeply haunted book in a very disturbing (but not explicit) manner. It’s a coming of age novel and it involves a teenage girl kind of maybe slowly learning that she might be Queer by watching an older woman be an older woman, treat her earnestly, treat her well, and care for her. So that’s the thematic pitch for this novel. The plot, however, involves a summer archeological/anthropological primitivism study where a group of college lecturers, students, and a family who’s just into it […]