Some Books, A Warmup
Next year I think I may try to track what I read, at least better than I usually do. To try to get in the habit, some things I have read recently:
- Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, which seems to be an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style. O'Connor's cynicism is so thick in her work that I find it distracting, but there is a lot to like here; vivid in many ways, unresolvedly strange, and absurd almost to the point of silliness at times.
- Michael Gruber's Night of the Jaguar, a literate (not to say literary) thriller that apparently wraps up the story of Jimmy Paz, Afro-Cuban Miami police detective (now ex-). Gruber's books are essentially urban fantasies marketed as thrillers, with their supernatural stuff drawn from third-world shamanism and the politics that come with that. They're all decent, though this one wrapped up a bit too easily, I thought.
- Humberto Costantini's The Gods, The Little Guys, and the Police, which seems to be out of print in English. Another book from the treasure trove of Avon's Latin American translations from the '80s which I stumbled upon at an estate sale a few years back. Costantini's novel is set in 1975 and chronicles the fates of the Polimnia Club, a group of poetry enthusiasts who have been unknowingly targeted by the Argentinian police as a group of subversives. The Greek gods Aphrodite, Athena, and Hermes, helpless to stop the death squads set into motion by reckless Hades, attempt to give their favored mortals one last evening of romantic and intellectual delight. Written while Costantini himself was in hiding from the Argentinian government (he eventually went into exile in Mexico), this is a bittersweet story, bizarre in conception but surprisingly satisfying in execution.
- Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, which seems to be an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style. O'Connor's cynicism is so thick in her work that I find it distracting, but there is a lot to like here; vivid in many ways, unresolvedly strange, and absurd almost to the point of silliness at times.
- Michael Gruber's Night of the Jaguar, a literate (not to say literary) thriller that apparently wraps up the story of Jimmy Paz, Afro-Cuban Miami police detective (now ex-). Gruber's books are essentially urban fantasies marketed as thrillers, with their supernatural stuff drawn from third-world shamanism and the politics that come with that. They're all decent, though this one wrapped up a bit too easily, I thought.
- Humberto Costantini's The Gods, The Little Guys, and the Police, which seems to be out of print in English. Another book from the treasure trove of Avon's Latin American translations from the '80s which I stumbled upon at an estate sale a few years back. Costantini's novel is set in 1975 and chronicles the fates of the Polimnia Club, a group of poetry enthusiasts who have been unknowingly targeted by the Argentinian police as a group of subversives. The Greek gods Aphrodite, Athena, and Hermes, helpless to stop the death squads set into motion by reckless Hades, attempt to give their favored mortals one last evening of romantic and intellectual delight. Written while Costantini himself was in hiding from the Argentinian government (he eventually went into exile in Mexico), this is a bittersweet story, bizarre in conception but surprisingly satisfying in execution.