elfs29's reviews
201 reviews

Perhaps I should give this five stars for the brilliance of Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams alone for its maybe one of my favourite short stories I’ve ever read. None of these are bad but of course collections fathomed over a lifetime always take dips, but not only were these surprisingly consistent but some were absolutely exceptional. Of course, for Plath is a seriously gifted writer and a brilliant mind. It was especially fascinating seeing events that crop up again and again in her writing, feelings and experiences she hunkers to completely perfectly depict and understand. I found Tongues of Stone a fascinating precursor to The Bell Jar, as well as Stone Boy with The Dolphin, The Wishing Box, The Fifty Ninth Bear and Above The Oxbow amongst my favourites. I could write at length about any of them, but really here Plath proves herself to be an almost perfect writer, with never tiring prose and a very honest imagination.

I've a dream of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.

oh my god this was really bad (many spoilers in this review). The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly not a perfect novel, excelling predominantly in its psychological assessments of the female experience, of religion, of oppressive regimes and of severe isolation. Offred’s extremely domestic and interior narrative was fascinating and in places entirely unique in the precision of its  display of the place of men in the female psyche. This story, however, abandoned everything of the kind.

I cannot actually believe how exceedingly stupid this narrative was??? The crossover between these three women, Aunt Lydia’s schemes, Mayday’s plans, were all elaborately ridiculous and unbelievable. It was all unbelievable, the timeline, the characters, the relationships were all desperately thin and lazily predictable. The idol and real character of Baby Nicole was clichéd and amounted to nothing, how did she smuggle in and out of Gilead so easily and in such quick succession? Agnes was able to become an Aunt solely because she was Nicole’s sister, how does that make sense? It was all extremely fast paced to the point of ridiculousness and the idea that Offred ended up as a Mayday operative when her guilty passivity drove her entire narrative is stupid.

The prose is predominantly made up of basic dialogue with little character or interest, the rest being simple descriptions of lives spanning so many years that all of them become unmoving, nothing but a step by step explanation of Gilead. In these moments, too, the prose style lost all of its previous charm. Without the internal narrative of a character with nothing left but a fracturing identity, Atwood begins to spell out the feelings of the characters as if we are stupid and it becomes bloated and a little full of itself.

Gilead in this novel became a spoof of itself and in the end somehow not scary anymore. It worked initially because the world around Offred was as indecipherable to her as it was to us but here, trying to lay it out, Atwood seems to have lost the core thread of its horror, becoming a web of buffoonery, pettiness and surface level schemes. In theory this is clearly meant to be show the futility of such regimes, but it almost removed the stakes. Also, one file being leaked about Gilead’s crimes being what Aunt Lydia was working toward for decades and the trigger to bring down the whole establishment is so anti-climatic and completely unrealistic.

I could go on, but frankly this sequel was an unnecessary disaster and a blight on the first novel. Abandoning all of its intricacies, Atwood has written this for the watchers of the TV show, and sullied its purpose in the process. 

If I hadn’t seen and adored the film, I’m not sure I’d like this the same way. This novel is completely entangled with the strange and enigmatic life of Burroughs himself, inextricable from the murder of his wife and life long addiction. The film, I think, does an excellent job of taking the emotional core of this quite indecipherable text and allowing it to robustly stand alone, whereas the novel, written by Burroughs as though he had no other choice, could never do such. It is brilliant, though, capturing Lee’s fracturing soul and desperate clamours for connection with an unsettling honesty the reader cannot turn away from.  

Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips.

This one certainly doesn't have the same depth or heart as some of Keegan's other stories, but everything she writes is thought provoking and melancholy in a unique and moving way.

It was the girl who had the brains, the girl who travelled through youth same as youth was a warm stretch of water she could easily cross.

This is such a fascinating little collection of stories, very evocative of The Thousand and One Nights that it keeps referencing. The Garden of Forking Paths and The Circular Ruins were my favourites, and all of them possessed the same mysterious, philosophical feeling, as if laden heavily with myth and the secrets of the universe that the characters seek. These labyrinthine tales of creation and knowledge seep with a brilliant understanding of something I can just make out the outline of.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as he conceived it. He did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of each other for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favourable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.

As Baldwin’s final novel, it is every culmination one would expect it to be, and I am glad I too read it last. It possesses many characters, various dynamics and incredible depth like Another Country and yet the massiveness of Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone, stretching over whole lives, more Arthur’s than Hall’s. It is a novel written by someone who has perfected his craft yet is never repeating himself, someone who was born to write and worked every day to do so. I read this over a whole month and every time I returned to it I was no less involved, but too feel like these lives we see that stretch across decades have too stretched into various parts of my life. Hall is a really interesting narrator, his own stories bleeding into his of Arthur because, of course, they are inextricable. Baldwin uses a perfect amount of unreliability dealing with this very personal narrator that speaks so honestly of what it is to love and fear and grieve. It’s just perfect. 

Then Jimmy comes out of the kitchen, with Arthur's drink, and hands it to him, and there is something very moving in the way he does this. It is probably impossible to describe it. Every gesture any human being makes is loaded, is a confession, is a revelation: nothing can be hidden, but there is so much that we do not want to see, do not dare to see. The boy had poured the stiff drink Arthur ordered into what I knew he considered to be a special glass, in fact, Arthur's glass: a square, heavy glass, with a wide silver band. He did not kneel as he handed Arthur his drink, as, for example, a Greek or an Elizabethan page might have done, but he was compelled to lean forward, and, unconsciously, he bowed. I was aware of this, perhaps, only because I was watching Jimmy's face, and I saw how his eyes searched Arthur's: his devotion was in his eyes, and that was why he seemed to bow. It was mocking, wry, salty, but it was love, and Arthur, as he took the glass, looked into Jimmy's eyes, and seemed to kiss him, on the lips, and on the brow. And both were very happy.

ahhh… modernism

I wish I could rate this higher, many parts of it I thought were very beautiful and the thread of Patti and Robert's relationship was gorgeous and why I kept reading. However, the way this book is written and structured is predominantly repetitive and very quickly loses momentum. The choices of what to focus on and what not to were clearly entirely from her perspective and not at all considered by what an audience needs to understand to feel invited into this fascinating artistic moment in history. Somehow I'm still not sure how any of this happened, how she stumbled into this world or how this world really felt, how these chances rose, how these encounters happened, how it really feels to be privy to arguably the most impactful and groundbreaking decades of musical and artistic American history. I still feel stuck on the outside, knowing about as much about this world as if I were watching it from a birds-eye view. The prose, whilst in many places moving, became quickly redundant, and I cannot understand at all why it was structured in the way it was. More than anything, Smith talks predominantly about being an artist, and yet through the writing, unlike her music, I cannot feel what is actually inspiring her, what her desires and motivations really are. I am disappointed to find so many faults in this as a novel when the relationship it tells of and the world it is set in are so brilliant.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.

A very honest portrayal of male intimacy and romance garnered and feared by WW1. 

“Your head seems tender, as if you were young,” Maurice repeated. “So do your hands. Touch my eyes, will you?—touch my scar.” Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man, as if hypnotised.

I think this is a really interesting and well executed concept that was very influential for female poetry especially. The wideness of the emotional landscape exists within and is changed by every physical movement, changes all the time, follows no structure, and cannot be predicted so therefore must be recorded.

I know you speak,
And are as suddenly forgiven,
It's the consequence of love having no cause
Then we wonder what we can say.
                                          I can say,
I turn formally to love to spend the day,
To you to form the night as what I know,
An image of love allows what I can't say,
Sun's lost in the window and love is below
Love is the same and does not keep that name
I keep the name and I am not the same
A shadow of ice exchanges the colour of light,
Love's figure to begin the absent night.