For a few months I’ve been slowly unloading boxes from my grandmother’s old house at my beloved used bookstore, browsing a bit, and coming back with books I don’t need.
Last Friday I found a hardback first edition of Barthelme’s Forty Stories, which is cool (it’s much more handsome and plain than the paperback Penguin Contemporary Fiction edition I have). I’ve been re-reading Barthelme’s Sixty Stories and writing blog posts about them that no one reads for a few weeks now.
I also picked up Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel The Taiga Syndrome, in translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. Here’s publisher Dorothy’s blurb:
A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down—that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one’s senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective’s quest into a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of Capitalism—accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty—though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.
I picked up Samuel R. Delany’s novel Babel-17 too, maybe in part of a continued attempt to get into his stuff, despite stall outs, shrugs, and, Hey, that was okays, and maybe just because of this cover:
The book’s Wikipedia entry notes that, “Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart noted that Babel-17 was one of his early literary influences, and was an important part of the crafting of the band’s hugely successful 2112 album.”
Well there you go.
Treasure that bookstore near you. Damn, you find such great stuff there, hah.
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