okay. let me try. first i’ll explain my feelings about goodreads. i like goodreads. i love lists. i’m a list freak. there are some people who are like this. i am like this. it’s a visceral pleasure that cannot bear the burden of an explanation. it’s the way i am.
but also i like a way of keeping track of the books i read. because i have no capacity whatsoever for remembering. i have never kept a journal in my life — i can’t, it’s an impossibility — but a few years ago i started keeping a book journal in which i’d write only the books i read and the books simon read, so i would know. now i can do it online. i love leaving all my documents online, because my paper documents litter my house in piles i don’t have the courage to begin to look at. they are everywhere, fossilizing, transforming themselves into different objects, maybe bones, maybe rocks.
i enjoy the vast online community less than mike does. i love exchanging thoughts on the books i read with my friends, but strangers, eh. and i do stress about the fact that we are leaving so many traces of ourselves in a totally searchable cyberworld. i stress about the fact that “online” offers such fake privacy and we are so thirsty for exchange with other humans that sometimes we forget this privacy is incredibly fragile.
but these are random personal thoughts.
blogs feel sometimes like a lot of responsibility. i have abandoned this for a long while because i didn’t feel very good at bearing that responsibility. apologies to my fellow bloggers, in particular to michael, who hates goodreads and lists and ratings.
i just finished sherman alexie’s flight and am knocked senseless and also incredibly exhilarated by how a YA book can be so simple and so incredibly complex at the same time. as mike points out in his goodreads review, which you can read somewhere here, the moral of the book as the narrator states it (and he does state it, in words not much dissimilar from we all hurt, we are all falling, we all carry terrible burdens, we should be kind to one another) couldn’t be more commonplace, but, well, is there any other, really? does any writer who engages with the problem of pain and suffering and the way people can either succor or damn each other to earthly hell have another message to convey?* it is a sign of alexie’s tremendous power as a writer that he can say it and not make us cringe. i, for one, did not cringe. this simple message is put on top of such a harrowing cumulative display of the horrors of history that, frankly, it seems quite inevitable, and stating it simply and straight seems the only way to state it without being coy or silly or pretentious.
* there is always “this sucks ass where is the booze,” but i guess i was thinking of a slightly more cheery approach.
flight uses the word “beautiful” a lot. i like writers who can pull that off. the language is very guileless, in some ways, direct and forthright and perfect for a kid narrator (maybe a younger kid narrator than a 15-year-old), but the astonishment at the pain humans pile on each other, at the forgetfulness of history, at the (seemingly inevitable) misery of adults’ personal interactions, and the hope that things might be different, maybe, a little, are far from guileless. they are clear-eyed and heartbreaking and make you want to put your face in your hands and cry (which i would have done, if i weren’t frozen into tearlessness by all the news that comes out of our american torture chambers and our american wars, and by feeling submerged by the untold human pain caused by centuries of out-of-control political, economical, and environmental imperialism: but let’s not go there because there isn’t anything good there).
i also read porochista
hey michael, you asked.
am i all mixed up? is this not a YA novel? that would make sense. i was thinking about how to give this to a dear friend’s teenage sons and having to explain to her all the “language.” not that aforementioned teenage sons don’t use such “language” with total regularity, but you don’t want to have auntie jo sanction it by giving them a book that’s full of it, right? right.
Jesus, gio. what should I say? a “cleansing apocalypse” for 300 million people? perhaps it’s only an opinion that can be formed in leisure at a major university in a major city but I imagine it makes a big difference to many whether they can afford organic food, therapists and the like. Now back to my “deeply inhuman life!”
Cleansing apocalypse reminds me too much of rapture, and not enough of people’s revolution. (And even that latter option seems to me a wispy ideal.) So, giving up on any ex machinations, I zero in on the local, and the possibility both of the books you reviewed suggest — the incredibly tough job of making sense of others. The moment that nailed me in Alexie’s novel, YA or just A, is when he runs into his father. No spoilers, but I was startled at how a book that had seemed at first cartoonishly obvious then increasingly wise (but still slight) became suddenly for this reader one of the most moving, painful, hopeful reads I’d seen in years.
Because of where it goes, what it accomplishes, I say give it to your friend’s sons. I think a lot of “adult” books thrust upon me as an adolescent by well-meaning adults who saw in them important lessons (and Chaim Potok and Elie Wiesel were two key figures) tended to seem like sermons, wrapped up as novels. Alexie does what Vonnegut did for me way back when: he enacts the pain of being in the lesson, of achieving the lesson and insight, rather than standing above or outside of such knowledge. Does that make sense? I was always on the defensive against being taught shit, especially by people who seemed above the fray. But the pain is real and raw and in the moment–Alexie’s narrator is so well-realized that, zits and warts and tedious sarcasm and all, he might very have gotten me to pay attention.
okay, well, the cleansing apocalypse and all that was a direct expression of my feeling pretty down these days about life-in-america-and-possibly-the-world and wishing sometimes that it all just went away. it was hyperbolic. it was angry. it was furious, actually.
i am seeing pain in every novel i read. every novel seems to speak to me of the impossibility of living, not at a personal level, but at an interpersonal, social, structural one. so this is where this post came from. me feeling terminally stuck in a terminally difficult world.
Can’t say fairer than that.