Out with the old, in with the new

I don't often post year-end stats or best-of-the-year lists, mostly because they don't really mean anything to me.

I read, on average, a book a week, and that's held steady since about the time I became the sort of person who reads a book a week, about the time I started blogging. It's just not a very large sample to draw from for a top-ten list.

Aesthetic Apparatus
Michael Byzewski

But I can't help but call out some standouts from 2017. (They may be the standouts of my century so far.)

The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin.
Not a nineteenth-century Russian novel. Although it is, only with some surprising elements, like zombie plague, Mongolian pharmaceutical kingpins, and small pyramids made of some unknown substance.

Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin.
Short and thrilling. Highly original in its form as well as in its story elements. Transmigration of souls. I loved puzzling over what the hell happened. (I am wondering, though, if my enthusiasm for this short novel might wane over time.)

My Heart Hemmed In, by Marie Ndiaye.
This is one of the most intense reading experiences I can recall. I didn't really notice the writing on the sentence level, but proof of its effectiveness lies in how this book seeped into my consciousness. I spent the week feeling anxious, paranoid, suspicious, confused, hemmed in.

The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.
I'd been meaning to read this one for a while. Every book has its time and its place, and this one finally had its day. Absolutely a modern classic. I tried to read this one slowly, carefully. G.H.'s confrontation with a cockroach is rich with meditation on the meaning of life, the history of humanity, her place in the world. I can see myself returning to this book in a few years.

Short-term goals

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer.
Read it before the movie hits theatres. Progress on this front: I used a Christmas gift card to finally acquire a copy.

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman.
By January 31, for New Reads book club.

Chronicle of the Murdered House, by Lúcio Cardoso.
By February 7, for Reading Across Borders book club.

Catch up on The Familiar, by Mark Z Danielewski.
I have time for bingeing on Netflix serials, I should make time this literary equivalent. I started volume 2, but volume 5 has already been released.

Read more Clarice Lispector.
I have the Complete Stories at my bedside.

That's enough.

[Maybe this is the year for The Book of Disquiet.]

Tattered like the sieve of some stupid, grinning, sunflower-seed-cracking old woman

Last week's blizzard inspired me to pick up The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin. I recall treating myself to this hardcover, Christmas 2015; I was in D.C., and it was unseasonably warm and the timing wasn't right for it. Last week, however, was perfect.

Fittingly, I write this as it's snowing again. So much snow.

I love this book. It is deeply strange and funny and tragic.

You start off thinking you're reading something old-timey, à la Bulgakov. It's charming, but affected — of another era. But it's so not that.

Platon Ilich Garin is a doctor on a mission to carry a vaccine to a remote village, where an epidemic is wreaking havoc (and it's not the sort of epidemic you might expect). Garin's trying to negotiate fresh horses with the stationmaster but there are none he may be stuck there, till someone remembers Crouper, who didn't do the bread delivery so he might be available. And he has a sled, with fifty horses under the hood; the hood basically a tarp, and the horses are miniature, the size of partridges. (Other technology gets mentioned that jars you out of the mistaken belief that this is ninetennth-century Russia; this is not the world that you know.)

So the doctor and the sled driver set out.

And they encounter delay after obstacle after obstacle after delay. The blizzard itself has them moving slow, cold, blind, often in circles. There are literal obstacles, buried under the snow, like the mysterious transparent pyramid, the size of a hat, hard as steel.

"I said, where's the village?!" the doctor shouted in a voice filled with hatred, for the storm, the cemetery, and that idiot birdbrain Crouper who had led him who knows where. He was angry at his wet toes freezing in his boots; at his heavy, fur-lined, snow-covered coat; at the ridiculous painted sled with its idiotic midget horses inside that idiotic plywood hood; at the blasted epidemic, brought to Russia by some swine from far-off, godforsaken, goddamned Bolivia, which no decent Russian person had any need for at all; at that scientific, pontificating crook Zilberstein, who cared only about his own career and had left earlier on the mail horses without a thought for his colleague, Dr. Garin; at the endless road surrounded by drowsy snowdrifts; at the snakelike, snowy wind whipping ominously above them; at the hopeless gray sky, tattered like the sieve of some stupid, grinning, sunflower-seed-cracking old woman, which kept sowing, sowing, and sowing these accursed snowflakes.

There are Vitaminders. They have a Mongolian-wise-man feel about them, but more than likely they are merely corporate pharmaceutical kingpins, of the crooked variety, whatever they might be doing in the middle of nowhere.

There's a fantastic 8-page drug trip, where Garin understands everything but retains nothing; he's reduced to tears and a state of infancy (but not innocence). I mean, fucking Vitaminders. With product! It's weird.

Garin's nose — the size and the colour of it — is a recurring image; I wonder if this isn't meant to reference Gogol, though I'm not sufficiently well-read to explain the significance of it.

Tragically, Garin himself is often the reason for the delay, and he never takes responsibility for that. He'd hoped to make it by nightfall, but days go by. And sadly, the novel ends before he reaches his destination, so we never learn how that epidemic turns out.

Excerpt.
New York Times review (a bit spoilery).

[I'm thinking it's nigh time I return to Sorokin's Ice Trilogy.]

Summer, sloth, snow

"Summer is no fun without sloth," writes Charles Simic on The New York Review of Books blog. "Indolence requires patience — to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day — and I have none left."

While I have not been very present on this blog of late, it is not due to sloth. Sloth will have to wait a couple more days. I have patience left, just enough.

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One of the hot books to watch for this month, according to io9 (although the commenters are a bit harsher in their assessment), is The Age of Ice, by J.M. Sidorova.

This bizarre historical novel involves a Russian empress who builds a palace out of ice blocks and forces a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester to "marry" there, giving birth to two princes — one of whom discovers later that he's immune to cold. The story of Prince Alexander spans two centuries and three continents, and includes a ton of famous historical figures.

So it's historical fiction, but with a fantasy twist.

There's Russia and there's snow, and these two things in combination call to me.

The Colors of Cold: A New Story from The Age of Ice is available as a free e-book. I snapped it up straight away and I enjoyed it (though I'm not entirely sold on reading a full-length novel in this vein). It definitely reads more like historical fiction than fantasy, but that's not a bad thing.

St. Petersburg in the 1760s was much different than it is now. It was a city cut out generously, for growth, and it had not yet filled its own interstitial spaces. It lay like a fanciful appliqué on the burlap of my country's reality.

The author, a biomedical research scientist, blogs about writing and science at Narratology.

Excerpt.

**********************

I'm still reading Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy. That is, I'd taken a break from it, but on vacation next week I mean to make headway through the second book.

I also picked up some lighter fare, perhaps more appropriate for poolside reading, Louise Penny's Dead Cold.

Ice, ice, cold. Do you see a trend? It's one way to escape the heat.

They believed in this paper with all their might

I fell into a vivid and deep sleep: I dreamed I was in literature class at my gymnasium; I was sitting, as usual, at the desk with Shtiurmer; the classroom was flooded with rays of sunlight; outside the clean windows it was the beginning of summer; utter silence reigned in the classroom; the only thing audible was the scratching of pens and the measured steps of our literature teacher Vikenty Semyonovich, walking slowly between the rows as we wrote a final composition. I understood that this dream was from my old life long forgotten by me; for that reason it seemed funny and pitiful, but I was watching it because I was very tired; everyone is sitting, leaning over their desks; before me is a sheet of lined paper with the blue insignia of our school in the corner; my hand writes the title of the composition on it, "Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky"; I dip the pen into the inkwell, hold it over the paper, and suddenly realize that I have completely forgotten who Dostoevsky is; I raise my head and see the large portrait of Dostoevsky leaning against the classroom blackboard; I look at it intently; but the more intently I look, the more clearly I realize — before me is the depiction of a bearded, gloomy man with a massive forehead, who is entirely unknown to me; he gazes at me seriously. I look around: everyone is writing compositions about Dostoevsky; I try to remember and understand: What did this gloomy gentlemen do? Why are we writing an essay about him? Who is he? But my memory is silent; not knowing what to do, I glance at my classmates: they are wasting time, I nudge Shtiurmer with my elbow; he turns unwillingly: "Who is that?" I ask, pointing at the portrait with my eyes; he retrieves a thick book from his desk — the collected works of Dostoevsky — and hands it to me; I take it, open it, and suddenly realize clearly that this book, the sum of life of the bearded man with the serious gaze, is only paper covered with combinations of letters: it is about this book, this paper covered with letters, that we are writing our final exam essay. Only about paper — and nothing else! Everything becomes incredibly funny to me, now that I have to describe this paper in an essay; I start laughing and interrupt the dream.

Lifting my head, I opened my eyes: I was in the reading room. But in actuality, I was sleeping. And was already in another dream. All around sat the same people and the quiet rustle of paper. I raised my eyes. Four large portraits hung in their places. But instead of the writers in frames, there were strange machines. They were created for writing books, that is, for covering thousands of pages of paper with combinations of letters. I realized that this was the dream that I wanted to see. The machines in the frames produced paper covered with letters, that was their work. The people sitting at these tables were engaged in another kind of work: they believed in this paper with all their might, they measured their life and learned how to live from this paper — learned how to feel, love, worry, calculate, create, solve problems, and build, in order to teach others later how to live according to this paper.

— from Bro, first book of Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to finish this book. For something that reads so seemingly swiftly, it is incredibly dense and slow going.

The book begins June 30, 1908. The Tunguska Event awakened the primordial light that existed before time. It fell to Earth and evolved and seeped into life. It could now be found in the form of 23,000 human beings scattered across the Earth. Alexander, born the day of the Event, was part of Kulik's expedition to search for the meteorite, and he was awakened and became Bro. He spends the bulk of the first book of the trilogy searching for and awakening his brothers and sisters in light. Many of their activities are possible only because they have the cover of official Party business.

The above excerpt is interesting as it represents a new kind of awareness. Bro has been able to recognize light and non-light, but now he is suddenly able to see into things and into people to see their true nature. Plus it's a direct attack on Russian Literature. The whole of this chapter is pretty awesome actually. Bro discovers that man is a meat machine.

I can't say I'm not curious to see how the trilogy plays out, but it's going to take me a while.

Review: Lizok's Bookshelf

Related: Big Bang in Tunguska (documentary)

An opaque film

Humans multiplied and covered the Earth. Dependent on flesh and time, people began to live by the laws of the brain. They thought that the brain helped them to dominate space and time. In fact, it only enslaved them to disharmonious dependence on the surrounding world. People with well-developed brains were called intelligent. Intelligent people were considered the elite of humankind. They lived by the laws of the mind and taught them to others. People began to live by the mind, enslaving themselves in flesh and time. The developed mind engendered the language of the mind. And humankind began to speak this language. And this language covered the entire visible world in an opaque film. People stopped seeing and feeling things. They began to think them.

— from Bro, first book of Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin.

I collapsed inward

The only thing that vaguely excited me was astronomy. Not exactly astronomy itself but the heavenly bodies, hanging in space. Imagining the Universe, it was as though I lost myself. And my heart would begin to throb.

And later,

Astronomy was studied only in the third year at university. Nevertheless, I began to race from my physics and mathematics classes to attend the lectures of Professor Karlov, a well-known astronomer and specialist on the spectral analysis of planets. Listening to his rather muffled voice talking about the stellar parallax, the satellites of Mars, sunspots, the orbits of comets, and meteorite showers, I closed my eyes and forgot about everything. I collapsed inward and hung in starry space. And this feeling turned out to be stronger than others. It was incredibly pleasurable. I even stopped hearing Karlov himself. And I forgot about astronomy. I simply hung amid the planets and stars.

— from Bro, first book of Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin.

I can't recall in what context I first heard of this trilogy. I'm greatly enjoying the first book(Bro) — I mean, Tunguska event! What's not to like about that? (I have a feeling I may spend the summer with this event, through the eyes of Pynchon, Lem, and others.)

But I came across a review this morning that has me worried for what's in store. Has anybody read this novel? Scandalously unreadable, or just ambitious and unruly?

Unquestionably happy

My mother was unquestionably happy. Her bright, creative spirit, overflowing with love for mankind, floated and soared above us all, though she often said that "happiness — is when there's so much to do there's no time to think."

— from Bro, first book of Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin.

I'm in a bit of reading funk lately, and I'm acquiring books (including Sorokin's Ice Trilogy) that I feel I'm not yet at liberty to read — there's the kid's project I have to monitor, and I have my own project going on, and taxes still to file, and work, and. I have been reading Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, but it's dense, and long (and I've been reading it on my phone, for some strange reason, and that feels all wrong, yet I persist).

I have time to neither read nor think, and I'm not happy about it, Mr Sorokin.