HALF-ASS REVIEWS OF 5 NEW BOOKS
HALF-ASS REVIEWS 1
I am on a boat in Alaska. Here are some recent books I read and recommend.
1. THE SLEEPERS BY MATTHEW GASDA
Dan & Mariko are in a failed relationship b/c he won’t fuck her b/c he’s a balding pedantic pussy, I think.
He’s an English professor and one night, late, late, when he’s not fucking his girlfriend that he didn’t marry or impregnate, —to her dismay and their destruction, —he gets a Facebook message from a sexy young Latina student of his.
He immediately goes into horny overdrive.
Soon they’re meeting up at a diner where he takes dick-hardening medicine (which he needs b/c she’s fatter than he expected), and then they’re back at her place where he acts so old, weird, fumbly, and needy, that she revokes her consent.
Obviously that ill-advised late-night sybaritic attempt at Ancient Greek-style teaching (assuming he was gonna bugger her) has grave consequences for Dan.
The Sleepers is extremely propulsive with its careening intimacy and perspective shifts, and it is very sly with its use of time, especially in the final chapter.
I saw in Dan, my worst most loathsome instincts: phony, pedantic, lecherous, cowardly. Reading about his failed life made me wanna redouble my commitment to integrity.
I also loved that it was a New York novel. I love reading a book that takes place in a city that I love.
I don’t have a book to quote from because I read Sean’s copy that I borrowed because we were gonna have Gasda on the pod.
But I ended up going on a drinking binge and Sean couldn’t reach me. He got pissed, and he’s being punitive, podding with Gasda without me.
I was gonna steal a copy from McNally Jackson.
Usually I only steal from Barnes & Nobles, but they don’t carry The Sleepers (they also don’t carry my book anymore which is why I steal from them!).
But I saw through the window that my buddy Alex was working and I would’ve been embarrassed if he caught me stealing.
So I’ll just quote a passage from memory,
Even the sun in Greenpoint seemed gentrified, Dan thought. Mariko was in the living room. She was a failed actress even in their apartment. He could see her nipples, they were hard.
“When are you going to fuck me, Dan?” she said.
wat r u doing ? the sexy young Latina texted him at the same moment.
“Uhmm, after I write this paper on Marx. I’m busy, Mariko, for Christ’s sake! (not that either of us believe in him). I know you don’t have shit to do because you gave up on your acting career!”
“You know everyone knows you’re balder than you’re letting on, Dan. And what kinda stupid name is that! It’s barely a sound!”
“I can’t take this anymore, Mariko!”
ew like nevermind ur old & fat. . . bye. the sexy young Latina texted him, bumming him out, he thought, before realizing he didn’t feel anything.
“Actually, Mariko, I changed my mind. Bend over.”
“No, you missed your chance, buster! I’m gonna go see my ex-boyfriend, the old lecherous playwright and he’ll knock me up!”
Buster, Dan thought. Her language was already changing away from him.
“Mariko, I love you.”
“Dan, I love you.”
And then Dan killed himself.
2. VIA ÁPIA BY GEOVANI MARTINS (TR. JULIA SANCHES)
Geovani Martins is a superstar in Brasil.
His first book The Sun on My Head (2019) was a massive hit and was recently voted one of the Top 10 Brasilian books of the Century by Folha de São Paulo.
That book is excellent, slanged the fuck out, brisk, bursting with youthful energy.
But Via Ápia is a big, mature social novel that I think is even better.
The English translation is out July 1st and I bestowed it with this perspicacious blurb, perspicaciously,
Geovani Martins documents the marvelous beauty and tragedy of lives on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro with the humor, perspicacity, and expansive detail of Machado de Assis. But check it: the thumping boiling heart of this book is the sick-ass incisive malandra narrative voice brought to crackling life by Julia Sanches’s wonderful translation. Via Ápia is about carving out a space for joy, love, and friendship in a death-haunted dangerous place. Martins imbues every corner of this book with grace and light; it’s that dazzling quality that cements Via Ápia as a contemporary Brazilian classic.
Via Ápia is about 5 friends in their early twenties, working, hustling, smoking weed, dating, just living, in Rio during the government’s attempt to pacify the biggest favela in Latin America: Rocinha, in 2012.
Favelas are, essentially, communities outside the purview of the State; built up on the mountainous hillsides, the morro.
While sanctioned, turista-friendly life continues down below in close proximity, on the pista, or blacktop.
If there’s one thing the State fucking hates is shit outside its purview.
Rio wanted to make sure everything was hunkydory for the World Cup and the Olympics, so they launched what amounted to a military takeover, enforcing martial law in Rocinha.
Geovani’s best formal move is that he makes this all seem very quotidian, literally.
Every chapter takes place on a single day, —alternating perspectives between brothers Wesley and Washington; and roommates Biel, Douglas, and Murilo, —months before and during the police occupation.
We’re just living day to day with these characters, we get used to the rhythm, so when a singular tragedy strikes at the end, it stands out both for how sudden and mundane it seems.
Also, what’s better than reading a book that takes place in Rio de Janeiro?
Of course, Geovani’s Rio is a different Rio than I know.
I’m from the blacktop, of the ilk derisively referred to as playboys.
In fact I wrote a whole book from the blacktop perspective of Rio de Janeiro.
Tropicália is playboy Via Ápia. I think together the books provide a good portrait of the beginning and end of the 2010s in Rio de Janeiro.
Is my bias clear?
Nonetheless, Via Ápia is a sick book.
Here’s the final lines, when everyone’s at the first baile funk since martial law,
MC Marcinho finally came onstage, and the crowd blew up. When he took the microphone and shouted, Hello, Rocinha! the speakers seemed even louder. He began singing acapella: Nem melhor nem pior, apenas diferente. Not better or worse, just different. . . Then the beat came on, and everyone got down. As the lights flashed at high speed, smoke from the fog machine mixed with smoke from the weed and cigarettes. And as the digital drums shot through those hundreds of bodies, it was life—always life, never death—that made the ground shake.
3. HAPPINESS FOREVER BY ADELAIDE FAITH
Sylvie is in love with her therapist.
She thinks about her more than 600 times a day. She’s desperate for a hug from her therapist. She thinks about what she can do to get a hug from her.
She wants to do anything she possibly can to rend the artificial curtain circumscribing the therapist/patient relationship.
Of course, Sylvie has just convinced herself that the therapist is this amazing, special person because of the one-sidedness of their dynamic.
She’s like Don Quixote; books and her own imagination are so rich, interesting, alive, that real life is too scanty in comparison, so she has to invent, project.
The one-sided obsession becomes the only viable mode.
There is also a decorum, a set of formal expectations that make therapy easier than a conversation out in the wild.
Adelaide told me & Sean, when she came on the pod, that she used to write this zine called The Otherness of Boys.
The whole impetus of which was to give her something to talk to guys about, Hey can I interview you for this zine? Being much easier than a cold, How’s it going?
Sylvie got that same energy. Uncodified life is unacceptable, brutish.
Sylvie is Pierrot, the sad clown, forever pining for Colombina, never ever possessing the object of his desire.
Which is a much more romantic mode: perpetual longing. You’ll never know enough about the other person to get disappointed; they will always live in your imagination, magnificent and full.
Though Sylvie doesn’t take her imagination to the life-ruining ends of Don Quixote.
She finds a suitable, fulfilling friendship with Chloe, a real human woman.
One of the best scenes in the book is when Sylvie and Chloe take the train to go see a reading in London, and they’re charged up over the interaction with the writer, and just hype off their own friendship.
And of course, Sylvie brings the writer a gift of sweet treats, so that she’ll have a reason to talk to her apart from everyone there.
Sylvie knows she is special, and different, but she’s not sure yet, how to stand out.
Sylvie’s worldview is so peculiar that it defamiliarizes the whole narration of the book. Everything becomes strange and funny.
I at least thought it was very funny. Here’s Sylvie, trying (and failing) to get a glimpse of the real therapist, behind the veil of professionalism,
“I thought it would help if your husband . . .” Sylvie says, and then she stops.
The therapist’s face drops a little but she recovers quickly and nods, and Sylvie thinks the less awkward route now would be to finish her sentence.
“If your husband . . . beat me up, because of how much I like you.”
When Sylvie has finished speaking she looks to the corner of the room.
“That’s awful,” the therapist says, her tone sounding strained.
Sylvie keeps her face directed at the corner of the room and doesn’t move. She waits for the moment to pass. She thinks of the word ugly.
“It’s not going to happen,” the therapist says, her voice sounding softer now.
“I know,” Sylvie says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
4. THE DESERTERS BY MATHIAS ÉNARD (TR. CHARLOTTE MANDELL)
Mathias Énard is my favorite living writer.
All his novels are ambitious, formally innovative, and old-school in their orientation toward The Novel: there are characters, scenes, stories.
They’re also about the things that most interest me: romantic love, history, language, cosmopolitanism, and what it means to be a good person (and man).
There’s a dual plot in The Deserters.
In one, mathematicians are gathered on a small cruise ship near Berlin to memorialize this dude, Paul Heudeber who wrote a crazy-ass poetimathematical treatise while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald.
His wife, Maja, and his daughter, Irina, are on the ship. Oh, it’s also September 11, 2001. . .
Irina is telling us this story 20 years later, trying to understand who her parents were; especially since she was blindsided by the reveal of a big secret about them late in her life.
The other plot is a gritty, visceral, almost allegorical story about a solider deserting his army and fleeing to safety through the mountains.
He ends up stopping for a night at this cabin in the woods where he grew up. There, a warbattered woman with a donkey pulls up.
She ends up getting struck by lightning, and he overcomes the war instinct to kill, kill, kill, and offers her succor and tenderness.
the donkey is one-eyed, its right eye is blue and white like a glazed marble, half-covered by its eyelid, its back bears wounds that are suppurating, he might have to kill it,
you don’t know how to do anything but kill, you don’t know anything about donkeys or animals, they have the innocence of their bestiality not you, you wrap yourself in brutality like a cloak,
The book is about the unfortunate endlessness of strife, the profound mystery of other people’s motives, and how to nevertheless persist in art & love within those terrible parameters.
Plus, Énard just writes so good in so many different styles.
Here’s when Irina, her ex-boyfriend Jurgen, and a young woman from the Balkans are in a bar after 9/11, watching a couple dance what the young Balkan says is called “the dance of betrayal”,
The man and woman were dancing the dance of betrayal before my eyes, there was more than one secret between them, they were holding each other close, whirling around, from shadow to light, I thought of Paul and Maja, of Maja’s body, I imagined their own dance of betrayal—Schinkel’s Berlin was mingled with ours, wild and uncertain; I could sense, see, glimpse a truth rising up between my father and mother, it was I who had to dance the dance of betrayal, there was a river, a rock, an island between my mother and me, the couple stopped dancing, they were standing motionless, facing each other, Jurgen Thiele called me by my first name, Irina, Irina, you were dozing off, and I opened my eyes, ashamed at having fallen asleep at the table, ashamed it was in front of them.
5. EVERY LIVING THING BY JASON ROBERTS
I used to think science was the lamest shit ever. Especially biology.
My opinion is probably colored by the fact that the only biology class I ever took was my Sophomore year of high school, and it was the first class of the day.
I was always so exhausted from spending all night texting, jerking off, and binge watching The Office (mostly separate activities: —jerking off and watching The Office certainly never coincided), that I was not primed to learn.
And it was a Catholic school. Just to give you an idea of how possibly ill-taught the subject might be, in that first period class, we would have to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which we would end with the addendum after “with liberty and justice for all”, we would say, “for the born and unborn”.
On behalf of Fetus Rights.
It was quite a shock to be at a public school basketball game and after everyone in the gym finished the Pledge (which we weirdly had to recite), to be the only one saying,
For the born and unborn
Anyway, I got on a Darwin kick after an argument with this brain-dead anti-evolution comedian, when I realized I didn’t have the chops to refute his argument.
And I discovered that scientists in the past were actually, shockingly, interesting & cool.
Every Living Thing is a dual biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.
I had heard of Linnaeus, but I had never heard of Buffon.
Neither man was born even close to rich. Buffon got lucky. He was named after a random rich dude in the next town over, and the rich dude didn’t have any kids, so when he died, he gave all his money to the kid named after him.
At the age of 10, he ended up with a fortune sufficient to allow him not to work for the rest of his life, and he certainly made the most of it.
Linnaeus, meanwhile, never came into any money. He had to hustle hard. He was on the streets of Hamburg busking as an itinerant lecturer.
He was a natural performer and a megalomaniac. When he would publish a book (usually at his own expense), he would write several rave reviews under a pseudonym.
That’s the shit that makes Linnaeus super sympathetic. But essentially, he exemplifies the worst of European intellectual tendencies. He was a total essentialist.
He wanted to give every single plant and animal a name based on his own system; and really, most of the names stuck.
What also stuck, for a long time, was his reductionist ideas about race; mainly, there being 4 races: White, Black, Red, Yellow, —with all the races except White having inherent negative attributes.
Nobody in Europe had ever though about it this way until Linnaeus in the mid 1750s.
Linnaeus also had a disastrous effect on the people around him. He had a group of 17 “disciples” that went on missions around the world to secure specimens, and 10 of them never made it back home.
Also, he was unequally unfair to his daughters, even by the standards of the time. They got NO education at all. But his daughter became the first female botanist in Europe by examining her father’s collection without him knowing and writing a paper on some plant’s something or other.
Linnaeus died in his 50s: brain mush; raving mad.
Buffon, meanwhile, exemplified the best of European intellectual tendencies.
He did not think nature could be reduced to 2 measly Latin names. He would spent like an entire volume of his natural history on a horse.
Nature was infinitely complex and ever-changing. Darwin even said something along the lines of “it’s amazing how much Buffon beat me to”.
He was a polymath that seemed to do everything right, and he ended his life as the best selling writer of the 18th Century, canonized as one of the geniuses of his time.
Somehow though, Linnaeus’s reputation ended up winning out. I think it’s because his system is easier to grasp.
Essentialism is easy. Capaciousness is hard.
Of course, I have nothing to quote from this book because I listened to it on Spotify.
Please never buy a book that wins the Pulitzer Prize (especially in non-fiction!): get it from the library, or steal it.
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