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Literaturliteratur

Literaturliteratur@supernormalreads.nl

Joined 6 months, 3 weeks ago

According to google translate, "Literaturliteratur" is the German word for "literary fiction".

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Literaturliteratur's books

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Miranda July: All Fours (2024, Canongate Books) 4 stars

Yes it is like Miranda July just called me and told me her life story in a very inspiring way.

4 stars

Content warning Mild spoilers

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Word for World Is Forest (Paperback, 2022, Orion Publishing Group, Limited) 3 stars

When a world of peaceful aliens is conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably …

The title is the best part

2 stars

A parable of racism and colonialism, in which the different “races” are humans and several different alien civilisations, including the peaceful Athsheans, who are obviously meant to resemble an idealised, primitive-yet-wise indigenous people. Unfortunately, the effect of this is to suggest that there are essential, innate differences between “races”, and that these differences underpin racism.

The Athsheans resist human colonisation and in the process learn to kill (humans, as well as each other). Le Guin implies that they really had no history or narrative before this point, as if contact with humans represents the start of their history. It’s weird and Eurocentric and quite un-self-aware. The narrative switches perspective between an evil coloniser, a good scientist and a good Athshean, and Le Guin’s depiction of the evil coloniser’s perspective is scarily accurate, though also rather easy for the reader to condemn (because he’s so bad). The actual prose is great …

It would be better without Adriaan

3 stars

I read this on a train journey, and it’s a great novel for that situation: short, unsettling, and focusing on a character who is unmoored. It is set in The Hague and succeeds in building up an uneasy atmosphere in which violence is always just outside the frame. The protagonist/narrator is a court interpreter and I found the descriptions of her work (and her ambivalence about it) very compelling.

However, the narrator is also trying to work out whether she’s in love with a married man who can’t decide whether to leave his wife. This strand could have intertwined well with the themes of language and underlying violence in the novel, if the married guy weren’t so boring! I didn’t have a sense of what real “intimacy” with him might mean. Maybe it was intentional that he seemed so ungraspable - altogether, the writing is so measured and controlled that …

Kiley Reid: Such a Fun Age (Hardcover, 2019, Putnam) 4 stars

Trapped in the white nuclear family

4 stars

Content warning Mild spoilers

Sasha Marianna Salzmann: Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (2021, Suhrkamp) 3 stars

„Was sehen sie, wenn sie mit ihren Sowjetaugen durch die Gardinen in den Hof einer …

Summertime sadness with Ukrainian tomato plants

3 stars

A sad story about growing up in Soviet Ukraine and post-socialist East Germany.

The early chapters describe the childhood and teenage years of Lena in pre-1989 Ukraine - we get to know her gentle father and her tough mother, and see how much tenderness she has for her mother, despite/because of her strictness. This part of the novel is beautiful, as is the description of her intense encounter with an eccentric girl she meets at summer camp. (Probably the most vividly described character, and definitely my favourite. It's also where the tomato plants come in. For me this was the queerest part of the book. There are also other queer strands, though I still wanted more!)

I wish the novel had continued with that single strand, rather than opting for "four women -- multiple generations -- how will they communicate with each other?" which has become a bit of a …

Jordy Rosenberg: Confessions of the Fox (Paperback, One World) 4 stars

Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century …

The fun way to read about propertization

4 stars

Queer thieves, intellectual sex workers, true love, and academic footnotes: this book appeals to many of my interests and lived up to most of my expectations.

What I love about it (apart from all the queer bodice-ripping and 18th century slang) is that it explains how everything and everyone (hormones, fenlands, footnotes, body parts) can be treated as property within capitalism - and suggests how we can rebel against that.

It is an extremely self-conscious novel which makes no attempt to be or sound "natural" or "realistic"; for some readers that might be a problem, but it's integral to the concept (which basically argues that authenticity is elusive or non-existent and not even that desirable anyway).

Why not 5 stars? Firstly, because the "common people" are idealized too much (e.g. when a thief is going to be executed, it seems like the entire proletariat are protesting while the bourgeoisie are …