Here are a few notes
regarding some great to good literary experiences—a novel in verse, a novel in
collage, and two “regular” novels—I’ve had recently, plus a link to my newly added-to Summer Session (which I need to bring
to an end here pretty quickly because the wacky academic calendar tells me the “fall”
semester begins August 17th).
red doc>, by Anne Carson, published in 2013.
what is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies
prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast through it.
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Has nothing to do with the topic. |
I always come away from an encounter with Anne Carson intellectually refreshed and artistically inspired. In fact, I’m fin to declare Anne Carson Month, maybe in October, and read everything by her I can get my hands on, prose and poetry, immerse myself. And as another example from red doc>, this is part of a description of a student who became a psychiatrist:
…his teacher at med
school called him a
minotaur who swallows
other people’s labyrinths.
good, I’ll do psychiatry he
said.
Une Semaine De Bonte¢, (A Week of Kindness)A Surrealistic Novel in
Collage, by Max Ernst, published in 1934.
In Seattle in the
fecund 1980’s, there was a lot of collage and Xerox street art, posters,
flyers, cards and what not, stapled to any wood surface available,usually covering "Post No Bills" warnings, to advertise punk bands, artist openings, poetry readings, etc. This book may have been a stimulus to those creations.
Max Ernst, running
with the Dadaist and surrealist crowd from Zurich and Paris in the early part
of the 20th century, cut out pictures from old textbooks and
catalogues and then arranged them in a narrative collage, divided into “themes
and elements” for each day of the week, and called it a novel. Few of the collages, or mashups to use current argot, make sense and almost all are ridiculously hilarious.
I have a hard copy
of the book, and haven’t seen an offer of an ebook anywhere, but the images
would look awesome on a tablet screen. Somewhat
sexist and misogynist, reflecting the times and the unfortunate attitude toward
women in the art world, Une Semaine
seems nonetheless to be a crucial artifact in the surrealist record.
Moby Dick: or,the White Whale by Herman
Melville, published in 1851.

And, while I like the following quote, it only takes up space in the
novel (maybe someone can publish a separate collection of adages and aphorisms): “Not seldom in this life, when, on the right
side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch
somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out.”
Broken Glass Park, by Alina Bronsky, published in 2008.
The narrator of the
novel is a Russian student who lives with her younger brothers and sisters in
an immigrant’s ghetto in Germany. The
action takes place shortly after their mother has been murdered, an act the girl
witnessed. Her goal is two-fold: avenge the murder, and keep her brothers and
sisters together as a unit with the help of an adult relative who came to
Frankfurt from Novosibirsk. The narrator
is actually helpless to realize the former, and the latter becomes the
substance of the book.
Being 17, the girl,
Sascha, (thinks she) knows everything, and she’s got a mouth on her, so the
first part of the novel contains some fresh, smart-ass critiques of her (our)
world, urban youth, migrants, either disaffected, or affected differently, taking the world they have been
born into, united by music and their internet-based intelligence.
The insight into the
struggling immigrant experience—“On the first day of school my classmates stared
at me as if I had just climbed out of a UFO.”—be it Russians in Germany or Mexicans
in the USA or Japanese in Brazil, is fully depicted. Unfortunately,
the sharp sound and fury at the beginning dissipates; the author turns soft,
doesn’t go hard the whole book. And Broken Glass Park turns into a
melodramatic non-page-turner populated along the way by a creepy father and son
tagteam lusting after her body, as well as some weepy, gooey reconciliation scenes.
So the jury in my
head is still out when it comes to Alina Bronsky. The potential is there, clearly. I’ll have to read another book by her to see
what the trajectory is becoming. Plus the
name Alina Bronsky is a pseudonym---why?
Well, until next
time…
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