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Le silence de la mer, Vercors (Jean Bruller). 1941. ~96pp? In French. University library.
A fine little book. Its historical import alone as the first French Resistance novel printed in secret under Nazi occupation makes it worth reading. It also has a fascinating high concept: a Nazi officer is billeted in a small French homestead whose owners decide, by mutual unspoken agreement, that as long as he’s in the room they won’t utter a single word. I didn’t realize until the very last paragraph that the book and the Jean-Pierre Melville film differ in their endings. Exactly one shot, the equivalent of one sentence, is added to the film. The change imbues the respective works with quite different meaning in a beautiful way. The film’s ending shocked me, and the book’s ending shocked me again, by the absence. The reason I was so surprised by the ending of the film is hard to explain. I can’t decide whether my shock should trouble me, and I can’t explain without giving everything away.
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. 1891. 330pp. Little free library.
Iconic. Can't stop thinking about it. This strangely modern novel of a poor woman dealing with the lifelong consequences of a rape is haunted by strangely modern phantoms and strangely ancient ones. These appear from nowhere in the gnostic style: the threshing-machine, a "red tyrant [the farm workers] come to serve", and its engineman, "a dark motionless being...in a sort of trance...a creature from Tophet...he served fire and smoke". At the very end, Stonehenge looms, ever more bizarre because of the association it now carries with New Age kitsch, as a dissociation, a bardo, perceived piece by piece in the night with the palms of the hands. My god, the end of Blood Meridian, the field where the stones are struck. These moments that pin the heart with gospel fear, instead of, on top of, the trembling love in a novel like Gilead. I say trembling because my template for that feeling is the glass on the piano at the end of “Sonny’s Blues.” What is the relationship between these two instincts?
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You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, Alexandra Kleeman. 2015. 283pp. Little free library.
A slippery collection of images and scenarios arranged together maybe by their examination of disgust. Junk food, commercials, game shows, bulimia, bad boyfriends. Ugly weird territory. That’s a wholehearted compliment. The prose is often gorgeous. I can feel the breath of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings strongly on this book—almost chapter by chapter in fact. Something feels hollow to me about this type of theory fiction at times, and not even hollow in an interesting way, but hollow like a tech demo at E3. Perhaps this is my plebeian tendency and my lack of graduate coursework in critical theory.
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Washington Black, Esi Edugyan. 2018. 417pp. Little free library.
An adventure novel whose protagonist is a young enslaved boy selected as a scientist’s assistant. Enjoyable and stirring. For the first time in years I tore through this book in two days. We follow Black at the pace of a skipped stone through the requisite series of far-flung locales, meeting many minor characters who each have some particular noticeable feature or trait. I’m being slightly facetious. I’ve been reading mainly other types of fiction, so that by the end I wished for a narrower, deeper approach, but that’s not the genre, after all. Any modern reflex I detect in quasihistorical writing of this style tends to irk me. The central relationship between Black and his scientist is drawn with an interesting thorny complexity.
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Movies and TV:
A fine little book. Its historical import alone as the first French Resistance novel printed in secret under Nazi occupation makes it worth reading. It also has a fascinating high concept: a Nazi officer is billeted in a small French homestead whose owners decide, by mutual unspoken agreement, that as long as he’s in the room they won’t utter a single word. I didn’t realize until the very last paragraph that the book and the Jean-Pierre Melville film differ in their endings. Exactly one shot, the equivalent of one sentence, is added to the film. The change imbues the respective works with quite different meaning in a beautiful way. The film’s ending shocked me, and the book’s ending shocked me again, by the absence. The reason I was so surprised by the ending of the film is hard to explain. I can’t decide whether my shock should trouble me, and I can’t explain without giving everything away.
+++
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. 1891. 330pp. Little free library.
Iconic. Can't stop thinking about it. This strangely modern novel of a poor woman dealing with the lifelong consequences of a rape is haunted by strangely modern phantoms and strangely ancient ones. These appear from nowhere in the gnostic style: the threshing-machine, a "red tyrant [the farm workers] come to serve", and its engineman, "a dark motionless being...in a sort of trance...a creature from Tophet...he served fire and smoke". At the very end, Stonehenge looms, ever more bizarre because of the association it now carries with New Age kitsch, as a dissociation, a bardo, perceived piece by piece in the night with the palms of the hands. My god, the end of Blood Meridian, the field where the stones are struck. These moments that pin the heart with gospel fear, instead of, on top of, the trembling love in a novel like Gilead. I say trembling because my template for that feeling is the glass on the piano at the end of “Sonny’s Blues.” What is the relationship between these two instincts?
+++
You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, Alexandra Kleeman. 2015. 283pp. Little free library.
A slippery collection of images and scenarios arranged together maybe by their examination of disgust. Junk food, commercials, game shows, bulimia, bad boyfriends. Ugly weird territory. That’s a wholehearted compliment. The prose is often gorgeous. I can feel the breath of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings strongly on this book—almost chapter by chapter in fact. Something feels hollow to me about this type of theory fiction at times, and not even hollow in an interesting way, but hollow like a tech demo at E3. Perhaps this is my plebeian tendency and my lack of graduate coursework in critical theory.
+++
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan. 2018. 417pp. Little free library.
An adventure novel whose protagonist is a young enslaved boy selected as a scientist’s assistant. Enjoyable and stirring. For the first time in years I tore through this book in two days. We follow Black at the pace of a skipped stone through the requisite series of far-flung locales, meeting many minor characters who each have some particular noticeable feature or trait. I’m being slightly facetious. I’ve been reading mainly other types of fiction, so that by the end I wished for a narrower, deeper approach, but that’s not the genre, after all. Any modern reflex I detect in quasihistorical writing of this style tends to irk me. The central relationship between Black and his scientist is drawn with an interesting thorny complexity.
+++
Movies and TV:
- Dune 2 (2024) dir. Denis Villeneuve
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [臥虎藏龍,Wòhǔ Cánglóng] (2000) dir. Ang Lee
- Cry-Baby (1990) dir. John Waters
- Cube (1997) dir. Vincenzo Natali
- Nothing (2003) dir. Vincenzo Natali
- Booger (2023) dir. Mary Dauterman
- Omen [Augure] (2023) dir. Baloji ★
- The Vourdalak (2023) dir. Adrien Beau ★
- Falling Stars (2023) dir. Richard Karpala
- Never Look Away (2023) dir. Lucy Lawless
- Boy Kills World (2023) dir. Moritz Mohr
- "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners (1914)
- "Darkness over Donbas" [Schlamm, Müdigkeit, Hoffnung und Tod – wie die ukrainischen Soldaten in den Schützengräben des Donbass ausharren] by Szczepan Twardoch, transl. Sean Gasper Bye
- "Fits" by Alice Munro, in The Progress of Love (1986)