Mini-reviews

Just thinking over the books I've read lately, I liked Nabakov's Pnin more than I expected.  Generally, Nabokov leaves me pretty cold (which makes it even more surprising I've read 8 of his novels!).  At the time Nabokov was writing, it was much easier to land faculty jobs, so Pnin must have been really quite a marginal talent to not have gotten himself a more secure position.  Anyway, I wouldn't say this is going to cause me to run out and read the rest of Nabokov next week, but I'll continue my slow plod of one or so a year.  Pale Fire will probably be next.

I did enjoy Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, though I had some trouble understanding the motivation of the main characters.  Why did they break into other houses?  Not to steal but to impersonate long-term guests apparently.  This would make more sense if they were on the ropes with nowhere else to go (like the couple in D'Amour's play Detroit), but they have their own house in Florida.  I suppose they just wanted to lead a different life.  At any rate, I'll try to squeeze in Williams' latest two novels at some point soon. She's definitely less interested in quotidian struggles and is focused much more on environmental collapse, which is what is keeping me up late these days...

Ali Smith's Companion Piece was a quick read, and indeed I read a lot of it on my phone during the set breaks at the various concerts I was at this summer.  But it is a weird book.  It is set at the tail end of COVID restrictions in the UK, where some people are embracing the freedom while others are still very cautious.  (While Smith doesn't say so directly, her narrator may well be of the opinion that Boris loosened restrictions just try to save his own skin politically.)  Smith's narrator has a father in the hospital, from a heat attack or some other non-COVID reason, but she needs to maintain a kind of quarantine in order to visit him.  Then out of the blue, a former university acquaintance and her family come to crash at her place and she has to flee to her father's flat.  I'm not sure I would really want to watch it, but I'm surprised no one has done a contemporary remake of The Man Who Came to Dinner where the critic comes down with COVID and can't leave.  (One of my SFYS pieces explored this in a limited way.)  Anyway, this part of the book works pretty well, though it just reminds me of all the hijinks of Keeping Up Appearances that would never have happened in the U.S. because it is not as easy (or safe!) to impose on Americans the way that Hyacinth imposed on her neighbours.  The other part of Companion Piece was vastly less satisfying, as it was sort of a fever dream about an outcast girl from Medieval times.

I finally wrapped up Death on the Installment Plan coming back from Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The ending was quite disappointing, as Ferdinand is crashing at his uncle's house and starting to get sick, and that's it.  There is no linkage back to the first chapter where Ferdinand has cone through the war and become a doctor.   Given his general lack of talent and gumption, it's all but impossible to understand how this could have come to pass.  At any rate, I'm glad to be done with Celine.

The next several books on deck are substantially shorter, and I hope to get through them fairly quickly:
Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence
Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
Martin Amis The Alteration
Ali Smith Public Library and Other Stories
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent

 

Feeling Stuck

I would say I am feeling pretty stuck at work and also in certain ways in my home life, though I won't go into that in any detail.  There are a number of things I am waiting on, either to hear back from co-workers or social workers or guidance counsellors.  It's pretty dreary having so many unresolved issues all at the same time.  (That said, I am not expecting to be left hanging on for 30+ years, as was the case for King Charles III.  I'm definitely not a monarchist and I'd be more than happy if Canada is no longer a constitutional monarchy by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil.  I guess it will be interesting to see the new stamps and coins.  But for the next few days, UK and Canadian newspapers are going to be non-stop Elizabeth coverage, and I'm essentially trying to tune it out.)

I've learned that I really don't care much for Celine's Death on the Installment Plan, primarily because the narrator, Ferdinand, is such an unpleasant slacker, squandering most attempts by his parents and his uncle to improve his lot.  That said, he did hold down a job with a jeweler, which he lost through someone else's chicanery, and he served this half-baked inventor/journalist as an apprentice.  These sections were a lot easier to read than the many, many pages of him loafing around at home or pissing away the chance to learn English at an English boarding school.  But still I've kind of stalled out because I don't care very much for the book.  Journey to the End of Night was a much more rewarding read, though it was certainly bleak as well.  I even took Death on the long train ride back from Ottawa and only managed to get through another 100 pages or so.  I am taking a bus to Niagara-on-the-Lake tomorrow, and I will bring this along and hopefully wrap it up.  I imagine I will find the other books on my interim list somewhat easier going.

I also need to make a push to finish up this quilt that I set aside a while back.  It should be easier to work on this now that my daughter has moved up from the basement (where I stored the sewing machine).  She is taking over her brother's room now that he is in university in Ottawa.  But I feel a bit guilty I didn't finish the quilt before he left.  Guilt is not the most useful emotion, however, and I just need to put in a few evenings to see some tangible progress, and the quilting, at least, will get easier as I get back into it.

That's all I really want to write at the moment.  I am many, many posts behind on all of the things I thought about posting, and I'll probably have to do some triaging just to get caught back up.