My goal with this website is simple: to write about interesting books or texts and hopefully provide guidance to you, the reader, with, at times, in-depth analysis and explication. The main thing for me is to provide human curation in what is quickly becoming an AI auto-generated, confirmation biased landscape. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it limits what works are talked about, often serving recency bias, leaving great, older works to wither despite having much to offer.

Let’s get the hook out of the way: this is one of the greatest long-form American novels. That it was written by a woman in the 1960s (initially published in 1965) and languished in publication purgatory for decades makes it all the more remarkable because it has since developed a cult status, given new life (in 2024) by the excellent Dalkey Archive Press. This is not to historicize, rather to give a brief contextual overview.

Every time that we read, we create a specific moment, an experience that is immediate, forcing us to take in that which is directly in front of us, made up of all things from our past, allowing for interpretation while also being anticipatory, where we theorize about what is ahead and start to desire certain outcomes. Each session is different from the one before. This compounds as we read further and rely on our memory of what we’ve read, so that our understanding of the object in front of us is interpretive at best, made up of our past, present, and future desire, our memory and its problematic retellings. Which is all to say that this review is going to be imprecise and inaccurate, this first paragraph inspired by the final part of Animal Money and the ideas it presents, which, along with its surreal, sci-fi mystery backdrop might just be the maximalist beach read (if such a thing exists) that you’ve been looking for.

With her work largely forgotten or overlooked for 90 years, it is time we shift our gaze to Butts. Almost immediately in The Taverner Novels, Butts establishes an off-kilter feeling. She begins by describing the setting/landscape, and after a few pages you no longer trust the trees, the wind, or the ocean. There is something strange at work, as a group of people (brother and sister (Scylla and Felix), friends (Clarence, Boris, Ross), lovers (Picus), and an outsider (Carston)) gather together in this remote house in rural England, but the eeriness is balanced by beauty, and this pendulum is what drives the author’s style (e.g., “Like open fir-cones dipped in fire and cream, the thunder-clouds were piling up the sky. Mounting the hills, a wing of them rising out of the sea. Inshore, a breath of wind clashed the pine needles.” (37)).

What makes this book interesting is the way Lowry can put you in the middle of the action so immediately and intimately, the style characteristically his own. This is also what I loved about

Under the Volcano

Oedipus

We all know someone who is a great storyteller. Someone who can spin a yarn with the perfect amount of detail and humor and sexiness to keep your full attention, someone who has the natural gift. They’re letting it all flow through. That’s what it feels like to read this book. It’s like sitting with that friend who is damned good at telling stories, drinking a bunch of beers or wine, and talking shit about your hometown while ultimately loving it (and including enough nostalgia to make it resonate).

There’s so much here: so much language, so many ideas and concepts, so many tough questions, so many terrible and beautiful images. Like all great books, it cannot truly be talked about. There’s an essence that cannot be summarized or reviewed or put into smaller form. No, it must be read and internalized and brought to bear by the reader. I greatly admire these works because I think they are what literature needs to move forward. I also think it’s fair to criticize them, and, at times, The Tunnel feels overworked. Yet, it also regularly made me think about what it was trying to say to the point where I found myself discussing various arguments and ideas from it in the real world. Few works end up leaping into my conversations beyond surface discussions, so there’s a lot to recommend from that fact alone. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this book never quite gets out of first gear, making the entire thing a bit of a slog, rarely slipping into those transcendent moments where language and imagery carry you away so that you’re bowled over by an expected phrase. As though something which has lost the initial inertia or spark, it truly is a tunnel carved one shovelful at a time, reinforced the whole way – functional and structurally solid as hell, festooned to the point of nothingness, which, with its focus on disappointment and void, may be the entire point: “BEING. Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in Seeming.” (75)

The witch is dead, murdered, left to rot in a drainage ditch. Who killed her and why? These questions initially drive the narrative, though it’s not long before we learn the answers. Yet, the question of why lingers and becomes the nucleus of what follows.

What are we to make of things that are neither didactic nor mimetic? I guess that could be the question of all literature after 1970 or so, especially when it’s something, like this book, that hints at things both familiar and revelatory, so that you feel like there’s a big Truth here if only you could interpret the work in the correct way. Of course, there’s always fractals of truth, both big and small. It’s just about choosing a lens from which to view them.

It’s probably the long and circuitous sentences and paragraphs, turning in on themselves, constantly referring to the same idea(s) and reestablishing their own importance, becoming, in that way, familiar to all who have read Bernhard or others in that camp (not too hard to find some Hamsun here as well), which, I’m coming to learn, is something that I can’t seem to get enough of, though what that says about me, being so entertained from reading works with narrators who constantly obsess and revise their thoughts, is probably worth consideration (much in the way that this high-school teacher obsesses over both a minor character in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and his own disappointment that no one cares how he’s noticed something potentially important about this character), e.g., “The very thought of the contrary situation sufficed to make one quickly understand how impossible it would have been if it had not been the way it, as a matter of fact, was.” (15)

Solenoid revels in language and imagination in a way that speaks directly to me, reminding me, at times, of the unhinged-yet-romantic ramblings of Maldoror (even lifting that book’s most famous line on page 379) combined with the mystic puzzles of Borges. It’s filtered through a kind of existential angst ala Charlie Kaufman and/or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Just take a look at this bit of writing: “There are millions of diseases of the human body, parasites that devour it from inside and outside, suppurating diseases of the skin, intestinal occlusions, lupus, tetanus, leprosy, cholera, plague. Why should we passively put up with them, why would we pass by, pretending not to see them, until we are impacted, as we certainly will be? Our minds suffer, so will our flesh, our skin, our joints. Sores and pus will cover us, phlegm and sweat will drown us, injustice and tyranny will make us bow down, annihilation and impermanence terrify us.” (143) I love that. If you do too, then you’re going to have a hell of a good time with Solenoid, and I highly recommend it.

Follow the Chums of Chance as they travel via airship (sometimes through the interior of the earth) to the Chicago world’s fair, Iceland, Italy, Austria, and basically everywhere on various missions of observation/reconnaissance.

Along with the Chums, the novel more-or-less centers around three families (Traverse, Webb, and Vibe) as their lives become intertwined in commerce and worker’s rights, and eventually, what becomes the leading motivation for most characters, layer-upon-layer of revenge. The anarchist movements of the day (set from 1893 until just after WWI), including those in Colorado, drive the action as dynamite and bombs are set to gain attention and basic human rights from corrupt owners. As it develops and things escalate, Pynchon shows the natural end of capitalism and its inherent need to consume absolutely everything (the destruction of all available resources and our world).

These are stories about people teetering on the edge, whether that be the edge of some terrible action, of some buried desire, of some great joy, or of some perverted pleasure. It gives an off-kilter atmosphere to the stories wherein mostly pedestrian things happen. It’s a window into dark thoughts that usually pass quickly, here slowed down and expanded. The writing feels wildly free and also purposefully restrained.

Humberto Peñaloza, or Mudito, and a group of old women and orphans live in a dilapidated convent (or is it an asylum?) of sorts called the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación at La Chimba. Inside, there’s the ghost of an old man, who died naked and, as a ghost, chases women through the halls. If they pray hard enough, he slowly begins to be clothed, piece by piece. There’s Iris, who is the hope of the seven women/witches. She becomes pregnant and sneaks out at night to have sex. She treats one of the old women of the group as her baby and breastfeeds and pleasures her while Mudito gives voice to a paper mache mask that serves as an inanimate version of himself and muses on his life before: “...we all know one another here, in fact we’re almost all blood relations…to be someone, Humberto, that’s the important thing…” (122). And this is just the beginning, just a small window of what is to come.

God damn. If you’re American and haven’t yet done so, please read this book (and if you’re not American, it’s still worth a read). I think it’s best if you go in, like I did, not knowing too much of what happens. That said, from a high level, Bigger Thomas, a poor black man, gets a job driving for a rich white family and is slowly pulled into contact with communists before a terrible sequence of events unfolds.

What starts out as a kind of dark fairy tale quickly turns into much more. Twin brothers Claus and Lucas are left to be raised by their grandmother, a more worldly version of the wicked-witch archetype, in the midst of a war that separates them from the rest of their family. They have to adjust to their grandmother’s strange customs, living in a house apart from a nearby village. They have visits from an officer and priest that help expand their worldview and give glimpses of some of the goings on in the world at large. It’s not specified with great detail, but they are surrounded by war and danger and live under this constant threat.

I have no general interest in ancient Rome, the emperors, or their political intrigues. No, I learned a bit about those things over the years and have been happy to leave it at that, but this book pulls you into said world with such ease that I think you’ll enjoy the ride even if, like me, you don’t particularly care about the setting because this book is the work of a master, and it appears to be his masterpiece.

Of the five Krasznahorkai novels I’ve read, I want to talk about this one. This is what I’d recommend if you haven’t read anything by LK, and if you have not read anything by him, I hope this review encourages you to do so because, in my opinion, he’s one of the best novelists that we’ve got.

Genet wrote this book while in prison. Unfortunately, a guard found the first draft and burned it. So he wrote it again. It was subsequently published (after he got out of prison) in a very limited, more sexually explicit run. He later edited it into the form that we have here, and what a treasure it is. 

I think you should read this book. If you’re not into fiction, much less literary fiction, this makes a good case for it and gives you the tools to enjoy and appreciate reading more of it. And if you are into that stuff (like me), there’s still so much here.