elfs29's reviews
191 reviews

The momentum, feeling and precise intellect with which Baldwin writes absolutely never falters. His assessments of the American history and present are completely astute and look passionately toward a future. Amidst his fury and resentment and fear, Baldwin writes predominantly of love and what it is capable of, if only we allow it to be.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day - for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality-for this touchstone can be only oneself.

What an absolutely gorgeous book. Han Kang is an absolutely phenomenal writer. Every sentence is completely stunning, so carefully chosen and doused in incredible imagery. Not for no purpose either - the way she captures the collision of these two characters, weaves through their lives and experiences and philosophies to finally bring them together is absolutely stunning. I'm not sure any other author writes so beautifully yet emotively, not for solely stylistic purpose but to reveal the beauty and melancholy of the human soul.

The moment when the river water scintillated in the July sunlight like the scales of a huge fish, when you suddenly placed your hand on my arm, when I trembled to touch the dark blue veins running raised over the back of your hand, when, gripped by fear, I finally brought my lips to yours - has that moment now disappeared inside you?

When I walk into complete darkness, is it alright if I remember you without this unrelenting ache?

Keegan's stories are tiny, whole pieces of humanity. This really was such a beautiful piece of writing and I think the way she captured the sameness that Furlong feels but isn't quite sure why or how he'd like to disrupt, entwined it with comfort and confusion and threaded beneath it the story of the Magdalen laundry was seamless. Her writing harnesses both a whole melancholy and hopefulness within the potent atmosphere of the Irish farms in the 80s that is revealing and touching. As the title says, she imbues the small parts of the days that culminate into a life with incredible importance, the minute motions and almost indescribable feelings that make us alive.

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

I find this book extremely flawed, yet full of heart. I know that because I really sobbed at the end. I wish this novel had been just about Rosaleen, honestly, and a little about Phil and Maggie and Ed. Everyone else, honestly, seemed superfluous. Suffering from what so many contemporary novels do, there are too many characters and not enough time or perhaps understanding for them. When it’s good it’s really good, the writing is poignant and heartfelt, but the massive cast of characters and political commentaries felt unfulfilling far more often than not. Rosaleen, I love you, and had tears in my eyes almost every time you were on the page. 

But still; one story of Rosaleen’s life is this: she is a woman, she sits in the pub, and forty years ago, in a cold bed in Dublin, she held a girl from behind. 

Easy to read and quite charming, though an unsatisfying conclusion for something that seemed all the time to be leading toward something important. 

I find it fascinating, the way writers can categorise their lives and feelings by what they write, how often, for what purpose. Boyer utilises this necessity, as a writer, to understand oneself through writing, and breathes creativity into it, and deliberately politicises it because, of course, writing is more political than anything else. I could certainly read this again, it's hard to keep a grip on for the way it slips between styles and forms but it explains itself and is in incredibly thought provoking.

There is in not writing not very much time spent on envy which is a pang, mostly, which is motivating like getting a buzz from an outlet telling one to remove one's hand from the outlet, from the power source. There is the way that the lives of others seem so often unenviable and only enviable as they are 'writing' when all this time is spent not writing like right now in the not writing in which I should be dealing with bills, mail, laundry, my bedroom, months of emails from October onward even though it is now June, with my jobs, with care, with the contents of my refrigerator, with friendship, with my body which wants to get in the swimming pool with my body which wants to turn brown in the sun with my body which wants to drink some tea with my body which wants to do shoulder presses which wants to join a gym which wants to take a shower and get cleaned up which wants a lover which mostly wants to swim and then there is 'not writing'. There is envy which is also mixed with repulsion at those who do not have a long list of not writing to do.

This story alone exhibits masterful storytelling, the curation of a subliminal sadness and suffering through characters you are suddenly confronted by, and know nothing of. Until you read Raise High The Roof-beams, Carpenters and realise you know so much about them, or more accurately, what his brother Buddy knows about them. He wrote this story imagining his brother's suicide, trying to cope with his grief by imagining the day might have happened. It is fascinating for a character that Buddy loves so much to not be portrayed particularly well at all. Is he trying to be honest about his brother, grappling with a writer's versus a brother's duty? Or is it the infinitely more complicated truth, that someone need not be good for you to love them? Stripped of the sentimentality of Roof Beams and the cynicism of The Catcher In The Rye, this story folds into Buddy's oeuvre as an intersection between a picture of post-war America, the fractured psyche of a country and a man, and the fear and confusion of grief.

"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas." He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. "Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door."

The Price Of The Ticket might be my favourite of Baldwin’s essays so far. I’ve read almost everything he’s ever written now and have never been disappointed. His gorgeous personality and genius mind makes everything he writes better than almost anything else ever written.

Then, he said, I wondered if I might be in love with you.' I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me. To be valued is one thing, the recognition of this assessment demanding, essentially, an act of the will. But love is another matter: it is scarcely worth observing what a mockery love makes of the will. Leaving all that alone, however: when he was dead, I realized that I would have done anything whatever to have been able to hold him in this world.

Han Kang is a phenomenal writer, and especially in the wake of current South Korean martial law, this book is deeply impactful and absolutely heartbreaking. Kang writes of death and suffering tenderly yet honestly. By tethering the narrative around the 1980 Gwangju uprising, not only in the moment itself but for over three decades later, and the characters threaded together by Dong-ho as well as their own trauma both tells the story of a nation’s and personal suffering. The theme of violence and the body, how the body’s mutilation affects the soul, what a privilege it is to have a body to live in, is robust, and though the narrative teeters into the spiritual, no answer is provided. The reader, the characters nor Kang knows what all this violence means, only that the soul prevails somehow, in the flame’s wavering outline. 

Some weekend afternoon when the sun drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho’s profile flits into your mind, mightn’t the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can’t remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mightn’t that wavering be a soul’s emergence? And the place they emerge from, that they waver back into, would it be black as night or dusk’s coarse weave? Dong-ho, Jin-su, the bodies which your own hands washed and dressed, might they be gathered in that place, or are they sundered, several, scattered?