Catching Up

I don't tend to stick with things.  My attention span--for jobs, relationships, hobbies--seems to be about three years.  I have occassionally stuck with something for longer than that, but at the three year mark, the bloom inevitable fades, and, more often than not I scorch the earth and start over somewhere, something, with someone else.

Which is why it's a minor miracle that it has taken more than a decade for me to ask whether I wanted to continue writing in this blog or not. 

Clearly, I have come down on the side of yes.  But time passes, and memory degrades.  The books that I have reaad in the past few months have left relatively little trace, and I found myself unwilling to stretch them into their own individual posts.  There is precedent, of course.  At the beginning of this blog, some books barely merited a line or two. 

Liu Cixin: The Wandering Earth

Of all the books that I have read during quarantine, I had the most to say about this one at the time I completed it.  I recall wondering if the author was aware of his habits, whether he intended all the short stories in this collection to fit so neatly into the same universe.  Did he recognize as he wrote that his stories were all, in some way, weighing the vitues of being small against those of being large?  Or did he only see it after he stepped back and looked at what he had wrought, like a dinosaur seeing the pattern in a trail of ants that they themselves are unable to conceive?

Margarita Karapanou: Kassandra and the Wolf

I am beginning to sense a theme here.  I don't recall many details from these books.  Any self-styled reader can probably relate to the notion of remembering what you thought and felt about a book, rather than what it really contained.  In this case, the impression was one of a first attempt that was published by accident.  Vivid and evocative, in a way that often seemed to be testing the boundaries of what it could get away with--both in style and substance.  I felt the author reading over my shoulder, like an avid fan who introduces you to their favorite TV show and watches you watching, judging your reaction.

Hisham Matar: In the Country of Men

This item, like the previous one, betrays the weakness of the semi-autobiographical historical trauma novel.  Unlike the Karapnaou's effort, however, I find that I remember certain details, but nothing more.  It has the flavor of a book written because it could be, not because it must.  The author has a dangerous combination of a gift for language, and a vivid life from which to draw, but without a perspective on that trauma that necessitates its recording.

Anthony Jacquin: Reality is Plastic

And this is the opposite.  One gets the sense that Jacquin is struggling to convey exactly what he knows.  One could wish he was a slightly better, more organized writer, that he had a slightly more brutal editor, or that his manuscript was lost in a fire and he was forced to restart from scratch after having discovered in the final pages what he wanted to convey all along.  Nonetheless, of the four, this is the one that I will retain the best, for two reasons:  firstly, I am actually interested in what he has to say, both from a practical and a philosophical standpoint.  That reality is what I say it is--well, this idea is both seductive and compatible with what I tend to believe anyway.  Secondly, and as a result of the first,  I have actually taken the time to dig through his disorganized prose to pull out things that I can apply and, indeed, have.