(no subject)
Pedro Páramo - Juan Rolfo, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden - 124 pages - Finished 5/5
This book is supposed to be like the birth of Latin American magical realism, so appropriately its set-up, especially the ending, brought to mind Garcia Marquez (especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, storylines being doomed from the start, etc.). While it starts out with Juan Preciado, one of Pedro’s many many sons, going “home” to confront Pedro, it quickly becomes a vignette history of the town (hacienda?) that the Páramo patron runs. The town seems to be an extension of Pedro, and its fate seems to echo his own.
Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 - Frederic Morton - 387 pages - Finished 5/10
This book perfectly complements the book I read last year, Miranda Carter’s George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. While that one focused on political/familial interplay in the more northern part of Europe, the noisy neighbor in the south steps out on its own two feet here, with family and national politics more strikingly apart from each other. Nationalist Princip takes out his aggression on the pacifistic Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who rebels against wooden dynastic protocol envisioned in his Imperial uncle Fraz Joseph, who personally closes the curtains on the empire while everyone who loves to hate on Vienna are nonetheless rallying home to answer the battlecry. With special appearances by: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Joyce, Kokoschka and blink-and-you-miss-him Tito.
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he Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones - Jack Wolf - 549 pages - Finished 5/20
I heard about this book from someone else who compared it to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and in some sense regarding the time period and Faerie that is true, though it is far less epic (especially in the literal, literary sense of that term) than it is a mind-fuck. I found myself thinking thorugh a lot of the storyline tinted with the protagonist’s paranoia about the Faerie Queen that the Faeries should have appeared more, but then if they were as they might possibly have been, manifestations of some form of PTSD or stress-/grief-induced regression, repression, whatever you want to call it-then their manner of presentation in a more nonsense situation, makes more sense.
P.S. Your Cat Is Dead - James Kirkwood - 223 pages - Finished 5/25
This has to be a cult classic someplace if it’s not already. Seventies Greenwich hipsters, smart-mouthed “double-gaited” mob runners who flirt, a lot, and the cat Bobby Seale (dead to begin with). It might not impart anything lasting other than a crazy and witty outlook on a midlife crisis with an even crazier solution (e.g. a cookie tin of cocaine and “Jitters Was Here!” in lipstick on a bathroom mirror) but damned if it wasn’t good comedy.