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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Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was skeptical for the first five chapters but read encouragement online and kept moving along at which time, Rooney's realistic narration, musings and two-thread stream of consciousness story of the estranged brothers swept me up. I enjoyed the philosophical asides, the poetry, the pondering of each of the characters in their lively arguments and thoughts and empathized with their dilemmas. Alice, Peter's long-time lover reeling from pain after her mysterious accident leaves her unable to have sex (I keep thinking of Jake in The Sun Also Rises ) and Peter falls for a young sex worker named Naomi; Peter and his brother Ivan, a chess competitor, have just lost their father and are at odds over that and most of their relationship; Ivan loves Margaret, an older, married woman separated from her alcoholic husband; and, finally, there is a wonderful black and white dog. The only other Rooney I've read was which was not a high rating for me was Beautiful World, Where Are You: Chapter Samplerso I was delighted with how much I enjoyed Intermezzo.

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The Hundred Headless Woman (La femme 100 têtes)

The Hundred Headless Woman by Max Ernst
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The drawings in Max Ernst surrealist collage novel recollect Victorian black and white woodblock illustrations: nude women, besuited men, fantastic creatures, games, crimes, and conveyances encountered by Germinal/Perturbation, the hundred headless woman on her visit to a troubled dried-up earth, accompanied by Loplop the Swallow, "the Bird Superior".
References to mystery and religion throughout plus overt mention of impressionist painters of the era (Seurat, Cezanne, Rosa Bonheur) and other figures, Jules Verne, Mata Hari. Might be a fine college thesis and probably has been. Fascinating but still mysterious and worthy of rereading.

According to Andre Breton, The Hundred Headless Woman : La Femme 100 tetes

will be preeminently the picture book of our day, wherein it will be more and more apparent that every living room "has gone to the bottom of a lake" which, we must point out, its chandeliers of fishes, its gilded stars, its dancing grasses, its mud bottom and its raiment of reflections. Such is our idea of progress that, on the eve of 1930, we are glad and impatient, for once, to see children's eyes, filled with the ineffable, open like butterflies on the edge of this lake while, for their amazement and our own, fall the black lace masks that covered the first hundred faces of the enchantress.

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