orbis quintus

There are still incomplete posts on Murakami and China Mieville lurking in draft, but they can wait.

Rikki Ducornet. The Complete Butcher’s Tales. It turns out both Danielle and Bill were uncomfortable recommending this author for a reason. Some of the stories unsettle me, but not because of the sexuality. As i inched slowly through the book, i was jotting down notes, thinking they were being too cautious, too judgmental… not so. Some of her experiments are just that, experiments, and the results are questionable. At first, it seemed to be a simple formula of Borges and sex, but the level of perversion increases as one goes deeper into the book, and some of the experiments draw on other authors. One story came across as an absurdist parody of something out of Calvino’s Cosmicomics. My brain just wasn’t geared to figuring out what she was up to. The book has been set aside for a few days while i research and think more about what Ducornet is intending, as just being transgressive and experimental for their own sake cannot be it. I’m missing something obvious.
Alain Robbe-Grillet. At the moment i’m reading the Djinn novella. This stuff makes sense, in the way that it doesn’t make sense. The arbitrary nonlogic in its storytelling is pointed commentary on fiction itself. Groovy. I’m hooked.

Italo Calvino. Difficult Loves. Nope. I’m not in the mood for this now. I’ll probably put it aside for the future. It turns out that i read at least part of this book before, as the stories were very familiar. Plainspoken, whimsical stories about love are not my thing right now. Being in love is more rewarding than reading meditations on it.

Joe Hill. 20th Century Ghosts. Kat had me read the story “Pop Art” as she loved it so. We both read Heart-Shaped Box last year, and found it wanting, despite liking aspects of his style. (That novel should have been a novella or short story.) “Pop Art” rocks, fitting nicely into the slipstream genre (forgive my ignorance. I read stories more than i comprehend genre labels,) alongside the awesome Kelly Link, funny, heartfelt and dreamlike weird. Then i jumped back to start at the beginning, reading “Buttonboy”… ugh. Lemme get back to you on this.