Bottom and then top:
I’ve been enjoying reading the imperative surreal poems in Jiří Kolář’s’s A User’s Manual (translated by Ryan Scott). I’ve been reading them slowly, one or two every other day.
I got Anna Kavan’s Machines in the Head a few weeks ago and have read the first few stories. These are unsettling little parables. The work Kafkaesque is much overused, but it applies here: Kavan’s stories are cryptic, often pulsing with vague menace and surreal flourishes, much like her masterpiece Ice.
Middle: Anne Boyer’s The Undying will likely end up one of the best books published in 2019 that I actually read in 2019 (I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I’ve read more this year than in the past few years). An aphoristic memoir-essay, The Undying is a discursive dive into Boyer’s diagnosis of, treatment of, and recovery from breast cancer. It’s an angry, smart book, with little bursts of mean humor, and it rips apart the ways that neoliberal late capitalism have made health care inhuman and inhumane.
I also really dug Carl Shuker’s slim novel A Mistake. Set in Wellington, New Zealand, A Mistake is the story of Elizabeth Taylor, the only female surgeon at her hospital. Like The Undying, Shuker’s novel is in some ways a critique of neoliberalism’s attempt to quantify every aspect of medical care. The novel is set against “the minister’s mistake,” a plan to publicize each surgeon’s results. And at the beginning of the novel, well, there’s a mistake, one which Elizabeth is involved with. Although the blurb describes A Mistake as a “procedural thriller,” I found it closer to a character study of an outsider who finds herself increasingly alienated by her peers and friends alike. Shuker conveys his hero edging into paranoia and depression in sharp, precise prose which occasionally recalls Don DeLillo.
I absolutely love love love Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout so far. I recall its being hyped quite a bit a few years ago, after it won the Man Booker Prize (I think it was the first US book to do so), and hype often puts me off, but a short story I read a few months ago by Beatty at Granta made me seek out The Sellout. Beatty’s playful prose and zany plotting readily recalls the work of Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed. The story focuses on a farmer who grows watermelons and weed in the strange farm town of Dickens, which is ensconced in urban Los Angeles. Dickens is erased, but the narrator seeks to bring it back. He somehow ends up keeping a slave, a former Little Rascals star named Hominy. I’m doing a bad job describing the plot. The book is energetic and very, very funny, and Beatty’s satirical take on race in America is scathing.
I’d love to get proper reviews of these books out over the winter break, but for now, I’ll simply say they’re all Good Stuff.
Biblioklept 