Book notes

Category: Fiction

  • 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…

  • Returning to The Captive

    After just about a three-month-long break, I’ve picked up The Captive & The Fugitive again. I’m in Georgia on vacation right now, which means that my reading time is quiet time in the mornings or the evenings, not commuting time, which I think bodes well for getting farther along in this book than I did…

  • Ghostwalk by Rebecca StottSpiegel & Grau, 2007 (originally Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007)

    I started reading this book the day after I learned that I might be taking another trip to Cambridge (England) for a few days for work in January. If this trip happens, it’ll be my third visit: the first time, in March 2008, I stayed for eight days, the second time, in October 2008, for…

  • Forgetting Elena by Edmund WhiteVintage International, 1994 (originally Random House, 1973)

    Forgetting Elena starts out slow and strange; it’s unsettling and apt, the way it unfolds. It’s narrated by a man staying in a summer cottage with a group of other men. He seems new to the group and pathologically unsure of his place in it, or his place in the world, or just himself: he…

  • The Coral Thief by Rebecca StottSpiegel & Grau (Random House), 2009 (Originally Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009)

    In Paris in 1815, everything is changing. Napoleon is in exile, on his way to Saint Helena. France has a king again, and in Paris new streets are being laid, old buildings torn down. The freedoms, or illusions of freedom, of the Revolution are disappearing: Paris is no longer the place where any idea can…

  • The Magicians by Lev GrossmanViking, 2009

    Quentin Coldwater is seventeen, smart, and not particularly happy. Not that he has too much to complain about: “I am a solid member of the middle-middle class,” he tells himself. “My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be” (p 5). But he can’t help…

  • Proust, again: The Captive

    After a several-month break from Proust, I’ve started reading The Captive and am reading slowly,—even more slowly than I usually read Proust, now that I am bicycling to work a few days a week and therefore don’t have 35 minutes of reading-on-the-train time built in at the start and end of my day. I will…

  • The Winner of Sorrow by Brian LynchDalkey Archive, 2009 (originally New Island Books, 2005)

    Before starting this book I didn’t know much about William Cowper, just that Veda Hille uses bits of Light Shining out of Darkness in a song called “Cowper’s Folly.” Also, back in April, someone taped the whole text of “Light Shining out of Darkness” to a column in the Canal Street subway station, and despite…