Wow, this is tiring work. I'm among the Ws and is there any end in sight? Yes, there is, but it appears as though the final push is beyond my puff. So it is with a glad cry that I pounce on two little books - non-fiction - on the London Underground. And another on black holes and the history of the Universe. Non-fiction after this serious overdose of fiction is so welcome.
*****
But I might as well do a brief round-up of some of the better books in this inside straight to the finish line. Véronique Tadjo, a writer from the Ivory Coast, has written As the Crow Flies, a series of impressionist passages. A woman has an affair with her friend's husband which is discovered only after she breaks it off with the man. A beggar attacks a child whom he suspects of malign influence in a fit far more violent than territoriality. An actress in a wandering troupe obsesses over the leader. The impressions are vivid and surreal as the narrative voice switches between persons. Tadjo said she could have written a story that had a beginning and an end, but life is filled with fleeting interactions.
If you've ever wondered what your fate might have been like had you been talented and imaginative and filled with a yen to improve yourself but you had been saddled with alcoholic and semi-criminal families, you can learn all about it from two books, one superb and the other less so: Dmitri Verhulst's The Misfortunates and Justin Torres' We the Animals. In short, you end up alienated from your families no matter how much you love each other. But the paths to this alienation are many: education, sexuality, misunderstanding. In Verhulst's case, a savvy social worker cut through the obfuscation of his family to separate him from their criminality. In Torres' book, the incendiary writings in his diary discovered by his family propel him out of their orbit. In both cases, the gap between them and their loved ones is of heartbreaking proportions, and only gets wider as the years go by.
Trust the nobility to come up with sexual deviance. de Sade gave his name to one kind, and Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch to another. See if you can guess what the latter is. His Venus in Furs is supposedly the first in Western literature (to go by the blurb, the only literature - as though the Japanese, to take another culture, hadn't come up with similar ideas aeons earlier) to portray this proclivity. It's a somewhat tedious read, seriously dated (written in the 1870s as one in a series). But it hasn't lost its grip on popular culture: Wikipedia avers that in the last three years alone it has been staged several times, in New York and London, and Roman Polanski's had a go at it as well.
It's a real pain that I couldn't find any authors with names starting with X or Y to add to my list. It's not that there aren't any, but they are verbose.
*****
If you've ever wondered what your fate might have been like had you been talented and imaginative and filled with a yen to improve yourself but you had been saddled with alcoholic and semi-criminal families, you can learn all about it from two books, one superb and the other less so: Dmitri Verhulst's The Misfortunates and Justin Torres' We the Animals. In short, you end up alienated from your families no matter how much you love each other. But the paths to this alienation are many: education, sexuality, misunderstanding. In Verhulst's case, a savvy social worker cut through the obfuscation of his family to separate him from their criminality. In Torres' book, the incendiary writings in his diary discovered by his family propel him out of their orbit. In both cases, the gap between them and their loved ones is of heartbreaking proportions, and only gets wider as the years go by.
*****
Trust the nobility to come up with sexual deviance. de Sade gave his name to one kind, and Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch to another. See if you can guess what the latter is. His Venus in Furs is supposedly the first in Western literature (to go by the blurb, the only literature - as though the Japanese, to take another culture, hadn't come up with similar ideas aeons earlier) to portray this proclivity. It's a somewhat tedious read, seriously dated (written in the 1870s as one in a series). But it hasn't lost its grip on popular culture: Wikipedia avers that in the last three years alone it has been staged several times, in New York and London, and Roman Polanski's had a go at it as well.
*****
It's a real pain that I couldn't find any authors with names starting with X or Y to add to my list. It's not that there aren't any, but they are verbose.
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