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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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A collection of short stories by Anais Nin, some more intriguing than others.
I have some prejudices against her rather hedonistic lifestyle (as if I'm in a position to throw stones, but I do nonetheless...), but she can write and evoke some curious ideas. I might revisit her diaries some day, as I've now read enough Miller to know her better, and the internet might provide me some context as to their relationship. I recall watching "Henry and June" once upon a time, but was only then familiar with Henry Miller, and slightly.
Perhaps time for a little digging, adventure in the literary world, but not today.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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After Blood Meridian I was curious as to his other writings, and so found this.
I should have been warned off by the "Oprah's Book Club" label.
So, set in an indefinite future after a (presumably Nuclear Holocaust) has completely quieted all life on earth a father and son travel along a road heading westward through a landscape bereft of all life - plant or otherwise.
Only people, and the people are the same as in "Blood Meridian", pederasts, sodomites, cannibals, people at wits end trying to survive the end of days, and the freezing landscape of ash and rain and the invariably violent encounters with raiders and it's "touching" ending...
It got a lot of praise. Heaps of it. Only he paints in one colour, that of his sado-masochistic view of humanity, of the hopelessness of the human condition, of violence and death and worst of all even life.
I was on to him, the second book I've read of his, having read the first I was impressed with the narrative flow and voice, but - the second book, the same tricks repeated ad-nauseum and if he's still alive I'm pretty sure he's out somewhere at a Trump Rally and really, given the state of the world, I've had enough.
"Blood Meridian" was excellent, or I at least enjoyed the prose, characters, situations, but here he was largely exploiting my ignorance of the history of the "Old West"; in this I had little ignorance left to be exploited and so saw through the tricks, despite the consistent praise it's a vile book that offers no hope for the human condition and seemingly in the authors mind he rejoices in the despair he brings to paper.
A little too obvious and monochromatic for my taste, and I hastened to return it to the bookstore today. Not my cup of tea.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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In a way, like "Fanny Hill" in which the author finds a thousand ways to describe the most basic act of love.
Only, with Cormac McCarthy, the act is not love but Violence, on a Biblical, Apocalyptic scale, Ostensibly about a kid from Tennessee who joins the "Glanton Gang" and does the grand tour of the Old West, hunting down Apaches, Indians, Niggers, who-have-you, it's an over the top ode to violence, rape, murder, torture, sadism, the cruelty of man, an obscene diatribe on mankind's theology, of blackened ears and scalps worn as trophies around the neck, of mans relations to animals and men and the universe in general.
It's bleak, but written with a rhythm and prose that carries you along like soldiers themselves, silhouetted on the blood-red horizon at the ends of the world, being carried forward always to a bloodier future where neither and never law nor order applies...
Brilliant, after it's fashion, and I will have to track down some of his other novels. It's always a pleasure to discover a new (to me) author, and he's a few I can follow up with. The themes, vile, visceral, but the prose becomes poetry and bears you along...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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This was inspiring. Written in epistolary form - 2 long letters to an unnamed recipient, it deals with case of an unfortunate young maid of 15 whose parents are carried off by Smallpox, and must find her way in London.
Naturally, she soon falls in with a bawd and bad company, and is found lodgings in a brothel.
Thus follow her adventures as a "Woman of Pleasure", and she is by and large by no means an unwilling or unhappy participant. The first bawd, to break her into the spirit of things, sends one of her more experienced ladies to tuck in with a few nights and stoke the fire....
Things continue, and while there is never an obscene word - or even phrase, verily you can't read a sentence or paragraph without getting the vulgar, though tenderly written, gist of what she's saying...
Now - this is amazing, for an "erotic novel", in that it describes the same act, on rare occasion of 2 positions, in a hundred different ways. The same act. There's no "French Style" or "Italian Style" or "Greek Style", and for the French, was it simply the hygiene of the era was so bad? But she describes frequent hot baths in oils, etc, etc, perfumes, so - maybe simply not to the authors taste. Although the speculation as to his homosexuality may have prejudiced any inside knowledges as to the practices thereof.
And an interesting point, our narrator has a couple of stories of homosexual men, of whom she accuses of being depraved and despicable beyond measure (despite finding them attractive) - and this - I found funny, she judges not her own initiations at the same weight.
You can read it here online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25305/25305-h/25305-h.htm
Contrast this with Gilbert Gottfried's reading of "50 Shades of Grey".
Clearly - there's no blaming Gottfried given the source, but the difference in prose stylings shows a very clear winner and loser.
In the end, from her meagre triflings with vice she comes to a fuller appreciation of Virtue, which, in it's summary at the end, reads about as sincerely as De Sade's final lines in "Justine".
But - of the time, the genre, indeed a masterpiece.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Shirley Jackson, whom you've probably read, think "The Lottery" (High School Required Short Story) - in which lots are drawn and a person is stoned to death. The Claustrophobia of Small Towns, similar, in it's way, to "The Wicker Man" and others such.
"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" covers the same themes, only it's unreliable narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood, while 'of' the town that loathes her lives in a world so far removed...
The walls close in as you read, and the dialogue, simple, forceful, the events, well, something "had" to happen and then again nothing did, there are no surprises, merely you are there for the slow exposition of events...
And, when you read it - you know her, some version of her, some person that is seemingly twice, thrice removed from the world around them, here - well, Nelson, there are many such. But in this there is a certain gradual increasing horror, the events not to be spoken of yet everyone is aware, the hatred slow-turning to compassion...
It was masterfully written, although I did not enjoy it so much, but that is not to say it wasn't a masterpiece.