Some very smart people whose newsletters I enjoy call these sorts of things “capsule reviews,” and I am not a terribly original person, so I shall now also call them “capsule reviews” in the hopes that in doing so some people might be fooled into thinking that I am also a smart person. But these are probably not so much “capsule reviews” as they are “random thoughts that maybe would have worked well on Twitter except that we don’t go to there any more and I don’t have very many followers on Bluesky.”
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
I have read an embarrassingly small amount of Morrison to-date, so I intend to go through many (maybe all?) of her novels this year; I figured I’d start at the beginning.
I read this book all the way through on January 1st. Reading an entire book is one of my favorite things to do on New Year’s Day; it always makes me feel like I’m starting the year correctly.
I appreciated Morrison’s foreword almost as much as I did the novel itself, because I’m a weird sicko who likes to see how Great Masters talk about their earliest work. In it she talks about how she elected to structure this story which is about a whole society unconsciously conspiring to completely destroy a little girl. She wants to avoid leading readers “into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing,” and she tries to avoid dehumanizing any of the people who “trashed” the girl.
Which is another way of saying that this book simultaneously never lets anyone off the hook and also at one point makes a rapist seem sympathetic even as he’s committing this terrible act of violence. This is not easy to do and would presumably not pass muster with the inquisitors of BookTok;1 it certainly made me uncomfortable, which was, presumably, the point.
I caught the Guthrie’s production of the Lydia Diamond stage adaptation back in 2017. I would like to go back and rewatch it (a temporal impossibility) to examine how it adapts the novel, but, if I remember correctly, the little white girl who appears in one critical scene in the novel was portrayed on stage by a crude marionette. I can’t tell if this is very smart or entirely too cute, but it certainly stuck with me, so it must have some worth as an artistic choice!
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
Julia and I are reading The Dark Tower together, as she read it and loved it some years back and I have read very little King.
At one point King describes Roland (the gunslinger) waiting to shoot a pair of rabbits until they were both “at silflay,” which is a reference to Watership Down; “silflay” is a word from the made-up rabbit language that refers to grazing on the grass above-ground. I enjoyed this choice, partly because it’s always fun to get references, but also because it really is the best word for the situation. It also made me think about how much parts of Watership Down really stuck in my head - I’ve read it exactly once, more than twenty years ago, and don’t really think about it very much, yet apparently the Lapine language stuck with me enough that I caught this.
I mostly dug this book. Like the other Stephen King book I’ve read (The Stand), it is frequently very frustrating: the prose is never quite as good as it wants to be, but it’s certainly trying, and sometimes it works very well, even as it is also a rollicking page-turner. I’m interested to see where it goes from here, since The Dark Tower is seven books long. As of this writing we’re most of the way through Book 2, which is not as good but is also more maturely written, if that makes sense.
Samuel R. Delany, Neveryóna
I remain indebted to Phil Christman for introducing me to this series, which continues to delight and challenge me. This is the second book in Delany’s sword-and-sorcery-meets-Proust series, and is the only self-contained novel therein. In it, a fifteen-year-old girl named pryn (later, Pryn, once she discovers capital letters, because this is that kind of book) goes on a series of adventures and meets a lot of people, most importantly the leader of a slave revolt (a main character in the previous book) and various conservative powers that are opposing that revolution, either directly or obliquely.
What this means is that although she does do things like ride dragons and get into the occasional swordfight, mostly she spends a lot of time meeting people in their homes and then having elaborate philosophical conversations with them. At one point she listens to a multi-page story about two people intuiting the concept of pi. The book kicks so much ass.
I have not read nearly enough theory to get everything in this book; but that’s okay. Neveryona is the sort of book one could study for at least a decade, I think, so I’m going to forgive myself for not catching all of the all of it on my first readthrough.
I am going to read everything Delany ever wrote at some point. Not in the next five minutes (there is a lot of it, for one thing), but I can think of few better projects than 100%-ing Delany.
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