bookpost apr-jul-25
i gotta get this off my desk man
corey fah does social mobility, by isabel waidner
2023. queer eastern european surrealism
Followup to Sterling Karat Gold. Promising start, but I didn't like the end so much. Continues the same style, but instead of being about London and hate crimes it's about an unnamed eastern European country and how minoritised people are forced to play the part of a perfect victim in order to gain social standing, and how precarious that performance is. And also Bambi. Both have UFOs in them, both are lightly Kafkaesque. Mx Waidner loves a bit of evil bureaucracy.
I liked Corey's projection onto Bambi Pavok - an 8-legged Bambi-spider inspired by Nicole Eisenman' Bambi Gregor, a pathetic and abused deer-thing onto whom Corey explicitly imparts their tragic backstory, their victimization onto a creature at once both the Disney-manufactured ideal of a struggling young fighter and a skittish insect unworthy of love.
It's weird, because the hate crimes and grieving in SKG were direct and viscerally upsetting, but something about Corey Fah's interiority makes the constant barriers in place here more upsetting? A “case of self sabotage … Why they (plural pronoun, denoting the international, multiracial working classes) kept doing this to themselves, was incomprehensible.” It's a light and breezy read, Waidner's style direct and playful, but it's so miserable underneath.
Relatedly, I didn't realise until just now (late May) that the character Sean St Orton', gay playwright turned reality TV star, was connected to playwright Joe Orton. Similar situation to the footballers in SKG, but easier to miss if you're me and don't have a lot of knowledge about 60s murder-suicides. Sean's thing is that back in the 60s he also won the award for 'fictionalisation of social evils' that Corey shares, but to escape his partner bludgeoning him to death, fell through a wormhole, losing his social status in the process. He tells people he used to be an award-winning playwright, but nobody believes or remembers him. He now presents a popular show called 'St Orton Gets To The Bottom Of It', interviewing people to find proof of wormholes. People tune in to watch a sad man become sadder, and eventually he cracks. Corey takes over the show, which goes badly. It's a pitiable contrast to Corey, who is chasing their trophy, to Orton, who caught his trophy and has had his life arguably both saved and ruined because of it, because of unrelated actions, because of the way the media cycle churns through and spits people out when they're done with them.
The ending's a... timeloop... alternate universes sort of thing? They float above the stadium where St Orton Gets To The Bottom Of It was filmed. Honestly the metaphor lost me here. Mostly just thought about the ending to Dragon's Dogma. I might revisit this when Waidner's next thing is out. See if I understand their approach more.
fever dream, by samanta schweblin (tl: megan mcdowell)
*2014, tl 2017. spanish dialogue-only novella on motherhood and poisoning
Ugh i forgot to write anything about this one. I liked it generally, but as prev. established I'm not hugely a person affected by written horror, so sometimes the vague, unsettling style missed for me. I don't care about worms.
But I did appreciate the craft of it - the framing device (Amanda, sightless, in a hospital bed; her friend's son David, aggressively questioning her towards some sort of realisation before time runs out, but also dismissing her, providing no comfort) and dialogue-only approach works very well to propel it forward. That fumbling in the dark towards a possible, non-guaranteed closure, and the claustrophobia of a close and limited point of view. The original Spanish title was 'Rescue Distance', because Amanda is always in this low-level state of parental paranoia, measuring the distance between her and her daughter, trying to find the point at which she would become impossible to save if Something Happened. But the threat is environmental, and it affects them, despite the fact they're-only on holiday and will be going back to their house in the city soon and there they can go to the major hospital and fix all of this and-, so the distance calculation was never going to help. I like the class commentary you get from 'pesticides in a rural village', there's a lot to mine there. I liked David as this weird oppressive voice but the part about him dying(?) as a child and being 'transmogrified' into another child's body after falling ill and his mother essentially calling up the local witch for help didn't exactly scan for me.
Also I think Amanda wanted to have an affair with Carla sometimes. The gold bikini... I'm tempted to watch the movie adaptation, but I can't imagine it'll be any good. Also, apparently this shares similarities with Borges' "The South". I seriously have to go read Borges sometime,
poor things, by alasdair gray
1992. postmodern victorian frankenstein about women and sexual politics
I recently watched the 2023 film adaptation and had a fantastic time, so I figured I'd check out the original work. Admittedly I was quite drunk, but I spent the whole movie basically yelling at the TV like a sports fan seeing a great goal, but it was for, like, set and costume design. Turns out the book also does that to me! It's sharp, incisive, very funny, and uses its epistolary form experiments to great effect. Book with chapters and pictures, wow! Unlike the (internationally-cast) movie, it's also very focused on British class and international relations - if womanhood closes doors (and in Victorian Scotland it very much did), then her class (or class of her associated man) opens them.
Normally a story which touches upon.. a woman's perceived role in the relationship, in society, can grind me down a bit, but it uses its setting and outlandishness to mock and satirise bioessentialism to a ridiculous degree that I felt pushed past any possible discomfort. Bella's fantasy brain problem gives her an outsider's perspective - people repeatedly tell her gendered things that she immediately understands as completely stupid and discards. It's just wildly good, I can't praise it enough. I gotta read Lanark.
assembly, by natasha brown
2021. iiiit's the intersection of class and race in the uuuukkkkk
I occasionally listen to The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast, which is talks with authors on their new/upcoming releases. Brown was on an episode discussing her new book, Universality, and I thought it sounded interesting, so I got her debut from the library. It's: pretty good! Short, economical, stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue about being a Black British banker attending her white old money boyfriend's garden party, the specific turmoil caused from actually climbing the ladder - not impostor syndrome, but something else. The lack of dialogue was interesting; it's not about her actions, there's no room for doubt or misinterpretation or blame. Her internal dialogue doesn't need justification.
Some of the form changes fell a bit flat - a single footnote that felt a little Tumblr poetry, the dictionary definitions of white and black used to reinforce a 'how do you actually navigate racism when even basic definitions, when language is stacked against you' bit just felt a bit like... yeah I get it, but it wasn't bad. I liked how short a lot of scenes were. It was cheap with its word count, but truly, sometimes you only really need a paragraph to get the point across.
I'm interested in Universality - apparently it's about journalism and perspective, a newspaper article on a violent incident from a variety of viewpoints. It took years to write because she was doing ridiculous amounts of research, even going so far as to lie her way into a journo gig to experience the specific pressures of the job firsthand.