Book notes

Category: Fiction

  • Ruby and the Stone Age Diet by Martin MillarSoft Skull Press, 2010 (originally Fourth Estate, 1989)

    I hadn’t read anything by Martin Millar before, but picked this book up because the cover was well-designed and because everyone seems to love Lonely Werewolf Girl. But once I started reading, I wasn’t sure I’d keep going. Here’s the first two sentences: “Living in Battersea I one day arrived home in the early morning…

  • Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter HandkeTranslated by Krishna WinstonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

    There is something really appealing about this book, about the style of Handke’s writing and Winston’s translation. The story is at once straightforward and surreal, and from the very first page everything’s shifty, unreliable, the story casting doubt on itself. Here’s how the book starts: “Don Juan had always been looking for someone to listen…

  • Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

    I heard about this book from Danya, who quoted the first sentences, which made me grin. Here’s how the book starts: Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day…

  • Finishing The Fugitive, and taking a break from Proust

    I just finished The Fugitive, and it was good, and I am glad to be done with it. The “Sojourn in Venice” section was of course really pleasing, water and light and history and beauty and art, a brief boring digression on politics/diplomacy aside. There’s a surprise telegram (with an added twist) that makes our…

  • More in The Fugitive: “Mademoiselle de Forcheville”

    The “Mademoiselle de Forcheville” section of The Fugitive starts out funny, which is refreshing: our narrator’s doing his usual thing of walking around looking at girls, he sees a group of three and tries to follow them but fails when they get in a carriage. But then, joy of joys, he sees them leaving his…

  • The first part of The Fugitive

    With Albertine gone, our narrator immediately starts thinking of how to get her back: in contrast to the inaction of The Captive it feels like he’s suddenly all action, though really he’s still all talk: he decides he’ll marry her, but writes telling her how good it is that they’ve parted; he sends Saint-Loup to…

  • Finishing The Captive, moving on to The Fugitive

    The rest of The Captive has been pleasing (though slow) reading. I last posted a quote from page 160-something; between there and the end there is: Albertine’s trip to the theatre cut short by the narrator’s jealousy, an afternoon carriage ride, Albertine’s visit to the Verdurins forestalled by the narrator’s jealousy, the narrator’s own visit…

  • The Captive: the “litanies of small trades”

    Despite my initial ambivalence toward The Captive—picking it up then putting it down, picking it up and reading but feeling like it was going to be a tedious and claustrophobia-inducing recitation of jealousies— I’m now really enjoying it, and have been since around page 100. Part of this might have just been me getting back…

  • More in The Captive: Gazing out of Windows

    Besides jealousy, what’s at the center of The Captive is immobility—perhaps not surprisingly, given the volume’s title. At the very start of the book we learn that the narrator spends most of his time in his bedroom, so that’s where we mostly are, too. Sometimes it’s claustrophobic (as is that squirm-inducing jealousy I wrote about…

  • More in The Captive

    Despite that early beauty, this book is shaping up to be sort of squirm-inducing: at the center of The Captive, even more than in previous volumes, is the narrator’s jealousy. It isn’t absolute—or, at least, he says it isn’t—but it’s consuming. It’s the in-between-ness that’s the problem, the hazy awareness, the knowing-but-not-knowing: “I should not…