Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures is not a quick read try as I did to make it so (overdue at the library). Clarice Lispector is deeply thoughtful and concerned with identity and mysticism and love in ways that have never crossed my mind. Sheila Heti has written an afterward guiding the reader although I am still flailing. The book begins with a lone comma, and ends with a colon" and goes blank.

The story is about a woman named Lóri and her overwhelming obsession with and love for "the philosophy teacher Ulisses, who to a modern feminist reads as insufferably self-important."At one point, the narrator panics because she's unable to answer the question who am I and soothes herself by making a list of the things she can do:

"eat--look at fruit in the market--see people's faces--feel love--feel hate--have something not known and feel a unbearable suffering--wait impatiently for the beloved--sea--go into the sea--buy a new swimsuit--make coffee--look at objects--listen to music--holding hands--irritation--be right--not be right and give in to someone who is--be forgiven for the vanity of living--be a woman--do myself credit--laugh at the absurdity of my condition--have no choice--have a choice--fall asleep."

Lovely writing:

Her smile in springtime, "was a smile that had the idiocy of angels."

"Long before the arrival of the new season came its harbinger: unexpectedly a mildness in the wind, the first softness in the air. Impossible! Impossible that this softness in the air wouldn't bring more! says the heart, breaking."

On a memorable visit to a market, she sees the "pure purple blood running from a crushed beet root on the ground;" the potato...born inside the earth...whiter than a peeled apple; the fish smell was their souls after death; and the pears...so replete with themselves, almost at their peak; and the unwonted turnips. "

Maybe I've aged out of these love themes and the existential concerns that rack the narrator in physical anguish. Or a reread is in order. I also will go back to the author's fiction.

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To Write As If Already Dead

To Write as if Already Dead by Kate Zambreno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kate Zambreno is one of my favorite writers. I am inspired by her combo of memoir and subjective criticism on art and literature. To Write as if Already Dead presents itself in this style talking about Hervé Guibert Hervé Guibert's diary-like novel of his final months with AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and the challenges of his friendship with Muzil (Michel Foucault); then I learn from the inside cover both books are considered fiction. She talks about her second pregnancy during the pandemic alongside her comments on Hervé Guibert. One can't help but recall the horrors of the eighties while, at the same time, revisiting our pointless responses to COVID: washing vegetables, masking in the park, shortages and hospital crowding and so many deaths. All the sad and scary stuff we went through and I wonder what is store for us now.

Her notes are abundant and spark links to writers new to me like Sofia Samatar Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Chantal Akerman, Kate Briggs, Hélène Cixous, Suzanne Scanlon as well as artists and photographers.

Kate Zambreno also writes and teaches through the pandemic and my interest was piqued not only by what she was reading and writing, her interest in fragments and diaries, and what she assigned her students. Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Roland Barthes, Robert Walser, and W G SEBALD.



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For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started with enthusiasm for the nature writing "As they spoke, the owl flew between the trees with the softness of all silence, dropping past them, then rising, the wings beating quickly, but with no noise of feathers moving as the bird hunted."

Was amused by the famous post-coital passage where the "earth moves." "Oh," she said, "I die each time. Do you not die?"

"No, almost. But did thee feel the earth move?"

"Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please."

And cringed at the effective battle descriptions. "In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you are now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again;"

But the stilted characters, the artificiality the author uses to simulate formal Spanish, interfered with my reading and the book became a dramatic slog as I awaited and awaited the denouement. Would they he ever blow up the damn bridge?

In Jeffrey Meyers bio of Hemingway: A Biography, he excerpts some of the contemporary reviews of the book most of whom felt it reinstated Hemingway's literary reputation after some of his work of the 1930's. Edmund Wilson: "an imagination for social and political phenomena such as he has hardly given evidence of before." Dorothy Parker: "written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. It is written with an understanding that rips the heart with compassion." Lionel Trilling: Hemingway is wholly aware of the moral and political tensions which existed in actual fact" and is writing "to the top of his bent...equal to Tolstoy in his best battle manner" but weaknesses he pointed out: astonishing melodrama in place of tragedy...and devastating meaninglessness of the death of Robert Jordan...men all dominance and knowledge, the women all essential innocence and responsive passion." That struck me, too. Graham Greene criticized the love story 'told with Mr. Hemingway's usual romantic carnality." and V. S. Pritchett agreed that the novel "was marred by the love affair" but the book restored the author to "his seriousness as a writer."

Read this because a friend is doing the Atlantic's List and I had a copy, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc..., but this title is not on the list. Will I go on to read A Farewell to Arms? Stay tuned.



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My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“To tell another person’s story,” Jenn Shapland comments, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.”
"All women are lesbians," according to Jill Johnston, even if they only love themselves. The author of this book, Jenn Shapland, uses her exploration of McCullers' sexuality and gender to research her own identity as a lesbian writer. As she pores through McCullers' papers, letters, therapy records, in at least four archives (U of TX Austin, Duke, Columbia, GA, and NYPL), she's trying to determine with whom the twice-married McCullers had relationships. She married Reeves McCullers twice and lived with several men while pursuing different women. There were many queer women writers who crossed her path while she lived in February House in NYC or at the Yaddo writing retreat in New York (Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, who was homophobically attacked by Robert Lowell for Communist sympathies during the red scares of the fifties) Described are her close relationships with Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and with her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer). Of course, affectionate letters notwithstanding, it is a challenge to try to determine the depth of passion in these relationships and the mixture of memoir and biography challenged at times, but I stayed interested. Microchapters help. McCullers was a dynamic, empathetic artist who suffered from ill health (rheumatic heart trouble generating numerous strokes, ten surgeries for paralysis in her left hand, removal of a breast) and alcoholism.. She traveled extensively and made a fetish of fashion. She wrote eight books, several plays, most dealing with loneliness and unrequited love which figured prominently in my teenage reading. When one wearies of reading scholarship, the story of Shapland and her partner, Chelsea, animates this unique memoir and sends us back to the work of McCullers.

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Sipsworth

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seeking respite from political mayhem, I picked up Sipsworth, a perfectly delightful escape: the tale of an 83-year-old woman regaining zest over a two-week period with the help of a pet mouse. Not my usual fare, but it was ideal. Detailed descriptions of her solitary meals, cups of tea, a Bakewell tart once a week, the old movies she favors on TV, her classical music programs, as she studies the facts about mice gleaned at the local library.
Memorable sentences:
"Returning after sixty years, Helen had felt her particular circumstances special: just as she had once been singled out for happiness, she was now an object of despair. But then after so many consecutive months alone, she came to the realisation that such feelings were simply the conditions of old age and largely the same for everybody....Those who in life had held back in matters of love would end in bitterness."
"The only real proof of her advanced age are a chronic, persistent feeling of defeat, aching limbs, and the power of invisibility to anyone between the ages of ten and fifty."

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Story of a Poem

Story of a Poem by Matthew Zapruder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An ideal book for me, Matthew Zapruder writes lyrically and thoughtfully about how a poem unfolds for him through various drafts and picks up bits of his reading along the way to add to his ideas, changing his poem with each draft. Part memoir, he talks about his pitch-perfect son's diagnosis of autism, his sobriety, his father's death, his reading, his visits to poets (W S Merwin), to the Isamu Noguchi Museum, about Basho, Li BaiLi Bai, and even Rupi Kaur, Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Mary Ruefle, Richard Hugo,and many more poets. Relatable and compelling, I read it late into the night and each morning I looked up poems.

"Dear Reader, I am trying to pry open your casket/ with this burning snowflake." James Tate

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