Julio Cortázar feeding yogurt to a cat.
The new year is nigh and the time is right to take stock of all we have done in the past twelve months. I made lots of New Year’s resolutions at the start of last year — read the Summa contra Gentiles in Latin, create digital notes for every book I read, do a front split — and kept almost none of them. I’m not too unhappy with that; in general, New Year’s resolutions aren’t meant to be kept. They’re meant to be followed for a few weeks and then archived until the following December, when we dig them up and use them as hatespiration to craft the next round of radical lifestyle changes we’ll try to impose on ourselves in the coming year.
To my credit, I got pretty close to meeting one of my top goals for 2022: to read twenty novels. I read eighteen. My pleasure reading is comprised almost exclusively of novels, so this number is less impressive than it may sound. (If indeed it sounds impressive at all; I have no idea how many books most people who enjoy reading consume in a year.) I made a valiant effort to diversify my reading list with some philosophy, short stories, and poetry, and my overall consumption of novels suffered as a result. I feel that I am no wiser for having “branched out” and temporarily forsaken the greatest genre of text that mankind has yet devised. Philosophy can teach you nothing that literature cannot, and literature is almost always a shrewder and more persuasive teacher. In 2023, I hope to re-devote myself to the novel, both as a reader and writer.
Anyhow, in the spirit of the winding down year and a renewed devotion to literature, I thought it apt to post, in no particular order, a few excerpts from some fiction that I enjoyed this year, along with some brief thoughts about the texts. I tend to favor modern American, British, Latin American and French literature(s), and I read quite randomly therein. Hopefully a book or two piques your interest!
High Rise (1973), J.G. Ballard
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved clearly into a more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school — all in effect abandoned in the sky — the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation.”
The fiction of J.G. Ballard was one of my top literary discovery in 2022. I started (as most people do) by reading Crash, which I thought was phenomenal. Then I read some excerpts from the Atrocity Exhibition, which I also thought were phenomenal. Finally I read High Rise, which I thought was the most phenomenal of all. I gushed about the book for weeks to anyone who would listen (few would). The passage excerpted explains the premise of the novel, so I won’t rehash it here.
I love many things about Ballard — his clinical prose; his horror of celebrity, wealth and youth; his willingness to push characters to their moral and physical limits — but I particularly love that there are no heroes in his novels. There’s no saintly observer who watches with satisfaction as his peers debase themselves. Everyone is depraved, self-interested, cruel, and mean-spirited. Everyone winds up dirty by the end, reader included. You feel dirty in a good way, it should be said. Dirty in a “I’ve-been-changed-by-something-I-read” way. But dirty nonetheless.
High Rise reads like a novel whose structure Ballard devised in an afternoon (and then filled in with sordid details over the course of several months). It reads like a novel written with an IKEA instruction manual close at hand. Assemble the novel thus: The apartment building is forty stories tall. The wealthy people live on the top fifteen floor and have pets, the poorer people live on the bottom fifteen floors and have children, the middle-class people live on the middle ten floors and generally have neither pets nor children. Familiar and strange dichotomies abound: men/women; wealthy/poor; aristocrats/professionals; children/dogs; parents/pet-owners.
Ballard stresses these dichotomies in heavy-handed, forthright ways. He’s clearly trying to make a point, though it’s not clear what that point is. High-rise apartment buildings will inherently lead to violent internecine conflict? Pets and children will become tools in the cosmic class warfare that awaits us in the coming chromatic techno-age? Perhaps the point is much simpler, something along the lines of: we think we’re civilized, we arm ourselves with money and morals and indoor plumbing, but, at the end of the day, we’re just one crisis away from slipping back into savagery.
Disturbing and engrossing though it is, High Rise never lets you sink completely into the world of the apartment-dwelling Londoners who burn trash and eat the roast hide quarters of dogs to spite their neighbors. You’re always aware that you’re reading a novel, and a highly stylized one at that. Maybe this is for the best. I wouldn’t want to live, even temporarily, in one of Ballard’s worlds.
Apocalypse Bébé (2010), Virginie Despentes
“Elle avait l’impression d’être à la tête d’une vraie fortune, à l’époque. Mais aujourd’hui, la somme est devenue un petit bas de laine. Elle s’est bien débrouillée, ensuite. Elle a eu un autre appartement. Son deuxième mariage. C’est à ça que ça sert, les bonshommes, elle ne voit pas pourquoi on se voile la face avec ça. Deux étages, à Joinville. Elle a dépensé l’argent de cette vente-là. Elle a eu beaucoup de frais, et jamais envie de travailler. Son deuxième mari n’était pas le pire, mais il a payé pour les autres. Il avait la main leste. Dès qu’ils discutaient, ça dégénérait, il finissait par lui mettre une droite, en visant l’œil. Elle connaissait tous les boutons sur lesquels appuyer pour le mettre hors de lui…Au moment du divorce, le gros lot. On peut dire qu’elle avait retenu la leçon.”
Literal translation: “She felt like she commanded a real fortune at the time. But today, the sum has become nothing. She did fine afterwards. She got another apartment. Her second marriage. That's what they’re for, men, she doesn't see why we have to beat around the bush. Two floors, in Joinville. She spent the money from that sale. She had a lot of expenses, and never wanted to work. Her second husband wasn't the worst, but he paid for the others. He had a loose hand. As soon as they argued, things got out of control, he ended up throwing a hook, aiming for the eye. She knew all the buttons to press to piss him off… When the divorce came around — jackpot. You could say she had learned her lesson.”
I’ve been meaning to read a book by Virginie Despentes — France’s resident écrivaine rebelle — for a while. Back when I started learning French a few years ago, I took a shot at Vernon Subutex 1, the first installment in Despentes’ trilogy about a middle-aged Parisian man’s descent into insanity, and was quickly turned off by her slang- and vulgarity-filled prose. It wasn’t that I was shocked by the words, I just didn’t understand them. I could read and understand passages from Zola and Stendhal, but I couldn’t tell you what “va te faire foutre, espèce d’enculé” meant. Thanks to some fortuitous twists and turns in my life, understanding French slang is (mostly) no longer an issue for me. Apocalypse Bébé, which follows a hapless private detective on her quest to find a troubled missing teenager, proved an enjoyable vacation read.
Since it’s a Despentes novel, you can be sure that drugs, rapes, orgies and murders will all appear at some point. Apocalypse Bébé doesn’t disappoint on any of these counts. I think Despentes is a far better portraitist than stylist, and you shouldn’t read her novels expecting beautiful prose. The ugliness — of the writing, the people, the places — is the point. Maybe. It is true that the book occasionally reads like YA fiction written for emo teens who hate their parents. But the plot and the characters are fascinating, and I think they (mostly) redeem the book in the end.
Also, the production of Apocalypse Bébé was tied up with Despentes’ relationship with (once brilliant, now dull and priggish) writer Paul Preciado. The book is dedicated to ‘B.P.’ and its epigraph is a quote from Testo Yonqui. So that’s kind of interesting.
Despentes and Preciado, back when they were cool.
“Werner” (2021), Jo Ann Beard
“It wasn’t so much that he’d never thought it would end this way as that he’d never thought it would end. His life was so absorbing—a series of long studio days pulling images out of the dark backgrounds. And he was moving away from that now, the backgrounds receding and the objects themselves seeming less iconic and barnacled and more . . . something else. He had wanted to see where he was going was all, had wanted to follow the work.”
Whenever a certain type of person asks me what I’ve been reading lately, and I list whatever is currently on my bedside table (or Kindle top row), I’ll get the following response — why don’t you read anything written by women? (Virginie Despentes notwithstanding.) It’s true that most of the books that I’ve read in my life were written by men, and that most of my favorite novelists are men (with notable exceptions Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, and Gertrude Stein), but who cares? The only thing worse than not reading books written by women is reading books solely because they’re written by women, and not because interest or recommendation guided you to the text. I don’t go out of my way to avoid reading woman-authored books, I just read whatever I want to read and think about the optics of my choices later, when writing Metaverse Hell posts. Just kidding. I think.
I can’t stand the weird systems of literary classification that many of us have internalized whereby women should read books written by women and South Asians should read books written by South Asians and people from Idaho should read books written by people from Idaho, etc, etc. It’s so provincial and narrow-minded. Yes, representation is great and we should work to publish as broad a range of (good) fiction as possible. Yes, many writers have transformative experiences reading authors who look like them, or write like them, or think like them, or whatever. But don’t presume to tell people what they should and shouldn’t read based on basic elements of an author’s identity. Writers — female writers, writers of color, rural writers, urban writers, rich writers, poor writers, gay writers, straight writers — can get something out of everything they read. I once heard about an aging Holocaust survivor whose favorite author is Céline. Weirder things have happened. Leave it to the PhDs to worry about the ethics and “praxis” of it all.
Rant over. (Does anyone even read these posts?)
That is an insanely long-winded and inapposite way of introducing this wonderful short story, “Werner,” written by Jo Ann Beard, who happens to be a woman writer. (Take that.) I discovered Beard in 2020, when I read her short story “The Tomb of Wrestling,” which details a woman’s internal monologue as she spars with a home invader. I think Beard is one of the most talented short story writers alive, but you shouldn’t necessarily take my word for it since I don’t read many short stories. For what it’s worth, though, she’s won lots of literary prizes and her collections generally receive broad critical acclaim.
Beard writes in limpid, detail-rich prose that pulls you in and doesn’t let you go until you’ve finished the story (usually in the first go). Her narrative voice takes on the personality and past of its protagonists and invests them with rich personal backstories — details about their childhood insecurities, ordinary moments that marked them irrevocably, improbable mental associations they make in life-or-death situations. “Werner” is a harrowing read about a man who awakes to the smells and sounds of his apartment burning down. The ensuing narrative is just as gripping and intense as it sounds.
El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), Gabriel García Márquez
“Entonces se volteaba en la cama, encendía la luz sin la menor clemencia consigo misma, feliz con su primera victoria del día. En el fondo era un juego de ambos, mítico y perverso, pero por lo mismo reconfortante: uno de los tantos placeres peligrosos del amor domesticado. Pero fue por uno de esos juegos triviales que los primeros treinta años de vida en común estuvieron a punto de acabarse porque un día cualquiera no hubo jabón en el baño.”
Literal translation: “Then she would roll over in bed, turn on the light without the least gentleness for herself, and revel in her first victory of the day. Deep down it was a game for two, mythical and perverse, but for the same reason comforting: one of the many dangerous pleasures of domesticated love. But it was because of one of those trivial games that the first thirty years of life together were on the verge of ending, because one day there was no soap in the bathroom."
There was a moment in early covid, maybe around April or May 2020, when it seemed like everyone was reading and recommending (but particularly recommending) GGM’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I’d read and enjoyed the book once in high school — it’s a delightful panorama of dozens of love stories in the Colombian tropics at the turn of the century. But I couldn’t — and still can’t — understand why people kept insisting that Gabo’s novel about a small, tightly interconnected community in a forgotten coastal city would have anything to teach us about how to navigate our highly online 21st century pandemic. Sure, cholera flits around in the novel’s background — quarantined ships and disease-ridden minor characters make occasional appearances— but it’s hardly the focus.
I found a second edition of Cholera in the Spanish-language section at an independent bookstore in San Diego this summer. It seemed like a good companion for the long, languid days ahead, and it was. I started re-reading the book at the same time as someone very dear to me started it for the first time. We sent each other pictures of the book as it followed us through life — on trains and planes and cars, in bed, in parks, at the pool, in cafés — and chatted about the book’s many sordid and hilarious details. (It seems like many people think of Gabo as an avuncular, staid writer whose books are mainly filled with wholesome stories about families and magic; a cursory familiarity with Florentino Ariza’s sexual exploits will quickly disabuse you of this delusion.) It is wonderful to read books alongside people you love. Their reactions to the text — what disgusts them, what excites them, which characters they can’t stand — gives great insight into how they experience life.
I’d like to write a longer analysis of Cholera in the future to defend a controversial (but deeply held) conviction about the novel: the best love story is the mature, long-standing one between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, Fermina Daza, and not the volatile and ultimately illusory one between Daza and Ariza. But this is a subject for another blog post, perhaps forthcoming in the new year.
“Vientos alisios” (1977), Julio Cortázar
“Siempre habían hecho el amor al final de sus cumpleaños, esperando con amable displicencia la partida de los últimos amigos, y esta vez en que no había nadie, en que no habían invitado a nadie porque estar con gente los aburría más que estar solos, bailaron hasta el final del disco y siguieron abrazados, mirándose en una bruma de semisueño, salieron del salón manteniendo todavía un ritmo imaginario, perdidos y casi felices y descalzos sobre la alfombra del dormitorio, se demoraron en un lento desnudarse al borde de la cama, ayudándose y complicándose y besos y botones y otra vez el encuentro con las inevitables preferencias, el ajuste de cada uno a la luz de la lámpara que los condenaba a la repetición de imágenes cansadas, de murmullos sabidos, el lento hundirse en la modorra insatisfecha después de la repetición de las fórmulas que volvían a las palabras y a los cuerpos como un necesario, casi tierno deber.”
Literal translation: “They had always made love at the end of their birthdays, waiting with smiling indifference for the departure of their last friends. This time there was no one, they hadn't invited anyone because being with people bored them more than being alone, and they danced until the end of the record and continued holding each other, looking at each other in a haze of semi-sleep. They left the living room, still maintaining an imaginary rhythm, lost and almost happy and barefoot on the bedroom carpet, they lingered in a slow undressing on the edge of the bed, helping and impeding each other and kisses and buttons. Once again, the encounter with the inevitable preferences, the adjustment of each one to the light of the lamp that condemned them to the repetition of tired images, of known murmurs, the slow sinking into the unsatisfied drowsiness after the repetition of formulas that drifted back to words and bodies as a necessary, almost tender duty.”
Julio Cortázar is one of my favorite authors of all time. Rayuela is one of the best novels I have ever read. Cortázar just gets it. He gets what literature is supposed to achieve (roughly — a moment of transformation, a sense of wonder, an overwhelming appreciation for the privilege of being alive and literate) and he knows how to achieve it. This short story, “Vientos alisios” (“Trade winds”), which I stumbled across this fall while reading his collection Alguien que anda por ahí, recounts the adventures of a couple that decides, on a whim, to go to Mombasa and trade partners with another couple. The story is ridiculous and improbable and maddening and somehow — because it is Cortázar — extremely believable. And it’s got paragraphs like the one above, which I think should be framed and displayed in museums and Internet front pages (since no one goes to museums anymore) all around the world.
Cortázar chatting with a cat