Saturday, December 21, 2024

Malady of Death - Marguerite Duras

The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The disquieting narrator of Marguerite Duras' 1986 novel The Malady of Death hires a woman to sleep with him silently and submissively for an extended period of time to satisfy his need for intimacy and, ultimately, sex because of his inability to love; he hopes "to make his body less lonely." She diagnoses his affliction as the malady of death" (others critics suggest he is homosexual) and she sleeps in his bed. He weeps for himself "as a stranger might." Finally, they appear to consummate their affair. She slips away one night and he hunts for her to no avail.

"You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier for you to make her disappear off the face of the earth, to throw her into the black water, it would only take a few minutes to throw a body as light as that into the rising tide, and free the bed of the stench of heliotrope and citron."

The story ends in a haunting vision of white sheets, black sea and instructions for a theatre or film rendition which was later produced on stage.

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Long Island

Long Island by Colm Tóibín
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I remember being better satisfied with Brooklyn than my response to this one. Long Island continues the story of Eilis Lacey, the young woman in Brooklyn twenty years hence now married with two children and visiting her mother in Ireland. The writing is skillful if not demonstrating the beautiful language I am eager to underline or note. I felt that there was too much introspection on the part of the characters especially Nancy, her one-time best friend. After a bang up beginning on Long Island, the action and pacing are slow and deliberate which I guess is fitting for inhabitants of this small Irish town where most of the novel takes place. Each of the characters is somewhat calculating, Eilis in her strength and refusal to be pushed, and especially Jim and Nancy as they individually plot their relationship, him by omission, her by action. The only notation I made was the use of the word "remonstrate" at least twice in a few pages because I'd not heard anyone use it. The mother was well-drawn as were the other lesser characters. I didn't feel the passion of the key figures in this story, it seemed everyone was making do, or is that the author's comment on late life romance? The ending does not resolve these dilemmas for the reader so it appears Colm Tóibín plans a sequel.

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The Most of It - Mary Ruefle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Most of It by Poet Mary Ruefle is her first book of prose. Quirky and surprising assessments of commonplace things beginning with snow which awakens her desire for sex and ending with burial and comments on the tombs of Jesus and of King Tut. In between she comments on killing, dying, lichen, birds, religion, housekeeping and a potpourri of thoughts from an anchorite on lists, penance, prayer, Shakespeare, news, books, rabbits and mistaken facts. The book defies description but yields similes and smiles. And I read and reread in a kind of calisthenics of the mind.

"Soon the trains, too, shall pass out of all being, while books, I'm afraid, will go on pretending the are still among us. My friend--for nothing hinders me from calling you my friend, especially the fact we have never met, and are only now pretending to--if all the world were made of paper, and perhaps it is, it could one day conceivably burn for year, like the rainforests of Brazil were once so fond of doing, and eventually we'd be reduced to a few square heaps of ash, as if the sun had strayed too close, or one among us drifted too far, the sensitivity of his organs of perception so extreme he regarded all of civilization and most of literature, an illusion."

Just pick it up and read a few opening sentences of the short pieces which make up the book:
"This morning I want to talk a little bit about killing."
"Fire is my companion, but I do not talk to it, it talks to me."
"A pet is a good way to tell time, better than a clock, for time is a measure of the changing position of objects, and soon it will be time to feed the pet, to exercise the pet, to replace its little ball, clip its nails or talons, wash it ever so gently, vaccuum up its shedding and so forth."
"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he had previously imagined possible."
"I wanted to go into the forest and collect lichen."
"Remove everything beautiful from your home, remove everything you like, love, cherish or are fond of."

See what I mean? Unexpected and compelling.

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The Best American Essays 2024 - Wesley Morris

The Best American Essays 2024: An Engaging Essay Collection with Award-Winning Voices by Wesley Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impressive collection edited by Pulitzer-winner Wesley Morris. I have read over half of them and was particularly impressed and touched by the work of Jenisha Watts relating her journey as a young writer from Kentucky; Jennifer Senior "The Ones We Sent Away" about her institutionalized aunt; Richard Prins' heartbreaking tale of mental illness in the mother of his child; and Christienne L. Hinz lovely piece on being a weed and natural gardening. I also was drawn to Brock Clarke's piece "Woodstove" about deaths in his family, dogs and people. There are also essays "grappling with the issues of our time" from Teju Cole, Sallie Tisdale, Yiyun LiRémy Ngamije, and Jerald Walker.

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Ladies Lunch - Lore Segal

Ladies' Lunch: and Other Stories by Lore Segal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The late Lore Segal's brilliant collection Ladies' Lunch: and Other Stories is gloriously relatable if you're past sixty and/or have ever known a New Yorker, witty throughout, particularly from these five women who have been meeting every other month for the last thirty years. The titular story is worthy of laughter and tears as the women undergo changes in life and health and abilities. The characters are treasures and they even try meeting on zoom during COVID.

At the restaurant, Hope "opened the door into the ladies' room and saw, in the mirror behind the basins, that her hair was coming out of its pins. She took the pins out and stood gazing a the crone with the grey, shoulder-length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen. She gazed, appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest. 'I've got an agenda: the Arbus factor in old age.' Hope looked forward to saying to jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence (chosen because it had bathrooms on the street floor)."

Also poignant is the story "Making Good" about a group of Jews meeting visiting Austrians in a "Bridge Building Workshop" to face off against anti-Semitism and Holocaust anger in the windowless basement meeting room under Rabbi Samuel Rosen's reform synagogue."


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Sisters by a River - Barbara Comyns

Sisters by a River is good escape fare. Such an odd book narrated in short pieces in first person by a young girl growing up amidst a large family of five sisters, a mad mother who is deaf, a nutty grandmother and an alcoholic father plus various staff, governesses and helpers and dogs in a rambling mansion along the River Avon in England. "Mammy had her excape in her imaginary lovers, we children did not have much excape in the winter, but when the summer came there was the sun and river, some mornings I would get up at five and row up the river before anyone else had been on it, and the larks would be singing and the cows standing together in the little bays where the water was shallow, and everything would seem so good and clean, I felt I wanted to cry with so much hapiness, this feeling would sometimes stay with me all day."

I can't really figure why it is so compelling. I want to keep reading but there's an anxiety as to how it will end? Violence? Bankruptcy? Abandonment? Is it to see if she grows up in the face of so much antagonism from parents and older sister Mary who's twenty by the end of the book to the author's sixteen? Is it to see what is next in the escapades of the six sisters? Or in their tales and animals? Is it to see if she learns to spell? The quirky misspellings are intact in the book and they scream out at me as I read along, "horrorible" or frit for fright or tiered for tired, imaginative and not impossible, but they jerk the reader out of the story, especially a grammatical reader. But like all Barbara Comyns's novels thus far, I am completely in her thrall and cannot wait to pick up another story plus the new biography.

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