I am without a doubt certain that this book has a deeply flawed and problematic nature to it. It’s a book about a white boy who goes to live with the Cheyenne after his family has been killed. He grows up among them, he learns from them, adopts their culture, customs, and language, proves himself enough to earn the name “Little Big Man” and then also finds himself repeatedly separated from and reunited with them. So it’s already rife with potentially problems. The issue for […]
Beneath the facade of glitz and glamour
“The scandalous, headline-making, and enthralling friendship between literary legend Truman Capote and peerless socialite Babe Paley.” This is a fictional telling of the socialite “Swans” of the 1950s and early 1960s that focuses mainly on Barbara “Babe” Paley, and her friendship with Truman Capote; however it includes many other famous women such as Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Pamela Churchill. These are the fabulously wealthy ladies who lunch, dress to impress, marry often and love to gossip. The era was […]
White Feminism: A Novel
I know “white feminism” is usually used as a pejorative (and appropriately so) but in this case it is also a really good descriptor for what the book is about. It’s about feminism and white ladies who are feminist and their white lady feminist lives. I have a white lady feminist life. I think maybe I just miss the books I read last year about worlds so far removed from my own. This was a book I really understood well. Our primary protagonist, Greer, is […]
And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?
This is another novel by the writer Julien Gracq, whose novel The Balcony in the Forest, I read earlier this month. This is apparently the novel that made him famous, and it makes sense because it’s much richer, complex, satisfying, and frustrating to read than that one. This novel, if you read the wikipedia page on it, is a “waiting novel” and that reminds me of several other similar novels both ahead of this one and after it. So the situation of the novel is that […]