Some books I abandoned (for now)

Five books that I’ve made some headway into over the past few weeks, only to set aside for later—

Wolfgang Hilbig’s Old Rendering Plant is a skinny hundred pages, but it’s also dense, with paragraphs that go on for pages. It’s also gloomy—it’s long intro seems like a rewrite of the introduction to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” suffocating, abject, and dulling. I intend to get back to the book, but it’s just too hot right now in Florida.

Getting a copy of The Erstwhile in the late spring was my excuse for finally reading Brian Catling’s The Vorrh, a big baroque beast of a novel. I liked The Vorrh despite (because of?) its many weird shaggy problems, but it also wore me out. (I reviewed it here). I can’t seem to get past the third chapter of The Erstwhile. I might see if there’s an audiobook of it.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas probably doesn’t belong on this list. Like Tristram Shandy, it likely belongs on a list I made last year of books I’ll probably never finish, yet return to again and again.books I’ll probably never finish, yet return to again and again. Calling the book strange is an understatement, and its punchy, short chapters lead to me reading it in a really discontinuous fashion (I was reading it in between stories from that Leonora Carrington collection earlier this summer, which was like a perfect cocktail of weird).

Tomasso Landolfi’s collection Words in Commotion was…not quite as weird as I’d hoped it would be. I read only the shortest stories in the collection, and while I liked the Gothic tinges, I was also reading a bunch of Barry Hannah short stories at the same time. And the Hannah stories were just like, so superior, from the sentence to the paragraph to the whole tale.

I spent the first few months of 2017 gorging on Paul Bowles, with somewhat diminishing returns. I loved The Stories of Paul Bowles but was disappointed in The Sheltering Sky; I read his “lesser” novel Up Above the World and appreciated its precision a bit more—it’s something closer to a genre novel than a philosophical exercise. I’ve made it all the way to page 50 in Let It Come Down twice now, each time getting there—it’s a chapter break—and realizing I have no idea what’s going on. I read and read, but not really. I’m not comprehending anything. I’m thinking about some other thing—food or a movie or a chore I have to do or a different book, a book I’d rather be reading now than this one.