August 14, 2023
There will still be addictions, relapses, traumas, betrayals, interpersonal dramas, and sudden deaths the day after the revolution. Comrades will still let us down, and we’ll still hold grudges and harbor resentments. Parents will still be uncomprehending or oppressive or worse, and we’ll still wish that we’d never said that to her or walked away that night or gone home with him again or fought with them or failed.
July 10, 2023
I’ve had an equally hard time shopping recently at supermarkets and at bookstores.
On Mircea Cărtărescu
Solenoid’s parasites take us well over the horizon marked out by any kind of realism. In one of Cărtărescu’s odder fantasias, his narrator comes to know a librarian with a messianic vocation: to find a way to communicate with the subject of his obsession, the world of mites, on whose astonishing variety, beauty, and omnipresence at the edges of our attention he soliloquizes at length.
The book’s great service is to disentangle love from care.
Boundless feeling has to be bound if it is to be encapsulated.
January 10, 2023
Interviews aren’t the same as sworn testimony, but they rhyme.
Despite the tantalizing whiff of democracy they seem to exude, museums are not democratic institutions, and never have been.
Have you ever read a stranger narrate their divorce in real time?
More novels should invent macroeconomic concepts.
I’m an asshole, he says. Don’t you love me?
On Deborah Levy
There is something to the way Levy writes that makes one believe she could hear, see, read, or experience anything and say: OK. She offers many interpretations, but few judgments and even fewer conclusions. Her loyalties are total and her betrayals are final.
January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
