Books I Read November 21st, 2022

So about six months ago I talked my way into a job in the bread department at a commercial bakery.

This is my excuse for falling off on writing these reviews and reading generally.

Magic Terror Peter Straub – 8 stories straddling the line between explicit genre thrills and the sort of quasi-nihilistic depictions of human despair which one might find in say, Ian McEwan. To be absolutely blunt I tend to prefer the genre end of these things more, a bit of the impossible makes all the darkness feel if not more palatable, at least a bit less tedious. Plus I admire the structural chops necessary to make a horror story work, it’s always easier to just let the thing careen into the general horridness of the human condition rather than come up with a genuine sting. Like I said there’s a bit of both here—his depiction of two monstrous, monosyllabled English thugs is genre enough that Gaiman wholesale lifted it for the heavies from Neverwhere, while the one about the horrific childhood origins of a serial killer reads like something from the darker end of Joyce Carol Oates. A talented guy anyway you look at it. RIP.

Party Going by Henry Green – A group of awful English elite get stuck in Paddington Station waiting for a train. It’s not Green’s fault that I kind of never want to read another book about the aristocratic England, or that I grabbed this without know what the plot was. That shit’s on me.

The Samurai of Vishogrod: The Notebooks of Jacob Marateck by Jaco Marateck – Cheeringly rambling reminiscences of life in turn of the century Poland for an unconventionally boisterous Jew. Odd and fun.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap – Memories of a childhood and life spent in the shadow of the author’s family’s wartime efforts as Slovenian partisans. Intimate recollections of a bucolic rural existence shot through with grief and trauma and intertwined with uncompromising if sympathetic character studies. Good stuff.

Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul – A series of essays primarily interesting as offering a formal autobiography of the author’s Trinidadian background. I’m doing a Naipaul re-read, so far it’s been fruitful.

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Fai Abasiyanik – A collection of short stories from the decades long career of (apparently?) Turkey’s most beloved short story writer. I really only have the back cover to speak to that but if it’s true, it’s not undeserved. These are really stellar, vibrant, curiously written portrayals of a lively, multi-ethnic, pre-WWI Istanbul, and of the long shadow left by the tragic loss of that existence. It reminded me a little bit of Robert Walser in its depictions of the strange of an urban setting, but there’s a seriousness and a darkness at play here which is very much it’s own thing. Lovely. Good on Archipelago books for bringing this, and a lot of other stuff I’ve been reading lately, to a larger audience.