36th book of 2022.

3.5. In the same way novels by black writers are always called ‘raw’ or ‘visceral’ (something I’ve discussed before), I’m now getting sick of novels by women being called ‘sly’, as if female intelligence can only manifest itself in the form of sneakiness. There are the other usual suspects too: ‘spiky’, ‘wicked’, and ‘bitter’. It occurs to me that negative words are often used to positively describe a woman’s novel. Take a look at those words and then compare them to the praise quotes on novels written by men that happen to be within reach around me: ‘Profound’, Proust; ‘Powerful’, ‘extraordinarily prescient’, Ballard; ‘Glorious’, Pynchon; ‘Important’, Rushdie. What’s that all about? Anyway, the worst quote is by Lauren Oyler who wrote the terrible book Fake Accounts, which despite being marketed well, has ended up with a fitting 2.95 average rating here on Goodreads (for once indicative of a book’s worth, usually I pay ratings no heed), who said, ‘Very funny and very fuck-you.’ Whatever that means. The best quote for this book is probably by Atlantic which says it’s like ‘Rachel Cusk’s Kudos on drugs.’

Mona wastes time somehow despite being shy of 200 pages but is a rewarding read. It’s full of witty lines like, ‘Mona had grown up in an environment where all the straight boys were devotees of Norman Mailer, committed to the belief that “tough guys don’t dance”’ and has a number of literary references throughout. Mona, drugged-up (mostly Valium), is attending a Swedish village where she awaits the verdict of ‘the most important literary award in Europe’ with a number of other writers on the shortlist. There are long speeches, descriptions of light hitting the fjords, lots of sex, a fair few pills, it is Cuskian in many ways. All the while she has bruises all over her body and she can’t remember why; as per usual, the theme of repression runs high: I’ve mentioned this countless times but there really aren’t many contemporary novels that don’t seem to deal with repression. Anyway, despite every popular book these days written by a woman (though this was originally published in Spanish in 2019), being ‘sly’ and ‘ruthless’, Mona lived up a little to the overused adjectives. I’d urge others to read it just for the absolutely wild, out of nowhere, off-kilter ending which, frankly, just left me a little flabbergasted.

Here are two quotes I highlighted for whatever reason to finish. There’s more I just can’t find them.

“The whole Thomas Bernhard thing fits them pretty well, for one: long paragraphs that hammer away at the same thing over and over. Anyone who reads too much of it in one go starts to lose their mind, I think. That’s why it’s funny that Thomas Bernhard has so many iimitators in Latin America—unbelievable, really. Whenever somebody gets depressed, you know, it’s like they have an interna sensor that tells them: ‘Do your Thomas Bernhard imitation. It’ll be great: you’ll see. It’ll be “literary” and give everyone the impression you’re actually saying something important.’”

After all, Beckett, like Heidegger, was basically a self-help writer for the intellectual class—and today’s intellectuals seemed ready to ingest mountains of far more solid and pernicious excrement. The idea that the Author was well and truly dead, that there could be no more valid interpretation of texts, that everything must mean something different depending on who’s doing the reading—it was the intellectual justification for the present crisis of meaning in the #fakenews media and in democracy more generally. Pretending that the nonsense intellectuals discussed among themselves remained limited to their caste, a rarefied discourse that would never spill over into the rest of the world—it was complete bullshit. The ivory tower was constantly being looted.