Émile Zola "Nana"
a story of a parisian sex-worker rising from a street walker to a high-class courtesan during the last few years of the second french empire. she is a myth, she is a legend, she is an ancient pagan deity whose overwhelming sexual force burns through the masculine establishment. men's undisciplined decadence and vain lust destroys them and the republic while Nana in her unconscious act of class revenge feeds on their finances, status, and self-respect.
i loved all the situational prose: dates, vain conversations in salons (mostly about Bismarck), detailed descriptions of the weather. there is also a strong queer undercurrent among sex-workers, however tainted by the competitiveness of the field.
Anne Carson "Eros the Bittersweet"
Anne Carson's first book, her dissertation on how eros is portrayed in Ancient Greek literature reworked into a non-fiction literary masterpiece. starting with portrayals of love between people, the lover's chase of the beloved and the unbridgeable distance between them during the adolescence of the written language, she applies the same geometrical analysis to writing and philosophy, to the pursuit of knowledge itself.
it was a bit of a hard read being focused on the Ancient Greek and detailing the particularities of language that i cannot understand, so i can only conceptualise the flavours described by her rather than experience them. but it is an incredibly helpful text to have a better grasp on all her following writing.
Anne Carson "Autobiography of Red"
one of my favourite books of all time. this was the first book of hers i read a couple years ago. but this time i decided to re-read it together with its sequel ("Red Doc>") and "Eros the Bittersweet".
a myth of one of the Heracles's labours reworked as a beautiful and heart-breaking queer story of two canadian teenagers: Heracles and Geryon. Anne Carson has a gift for keeping multiple contexts overlayed without fusing them, mixing but not shaking. in this book the myth coexists with the modern story. Geryon is still a red-winged monster living his relatively normal life and reading Heidegger.
this particular book is so abundant with unexpected metaphors and ripe comparisons, leaving mind soft and receptive to the beauty of the mundane world.
Anne Carson "Red doc>"
sequel to "Autobiography of Red". Geryon is now G and reads Proust and Kharms. Heracles served in the army and came back as sergeant Sad. he suffers from PTSD. here we finally see G's red cattle until Sad takes him away on an adventure, ending up in a psychiatric clinic/auto workshop based in a glacier.
Carson experimentation with styles and forms is in full force here. she accepts the formatting accident making the text a mere three words wide column. what is poetry after all? and here we hear explicit chorus named "Wife of the Brain".
i read it once before, about a year ago, but it was hard to follow for me at the time. as i submerged myself in Anne's other writing this trip, i could finally feel the extent of surreal imagery and human grief and care this book offers.
Mona Awad "Bunny"
an incredibly delightful magical realism novel following Samantha, an mfa creative writing student in Warren University. the workshop she attends is populated by a clique of saccharine, annoyingly affectionate girls from a wealthy background. at first she keeps her distance, hating their high-pitched mutual cooing, until they invite her to join their Smut Salon, where she discovers their dark extracurricular activities and gets engulfed in them.
to say anything else would be a spoiler. this is a story about the power of imagination and how it is informed by life experience and intellectual rigour. who can and who cannot create convincing characters. it's a story about the writing itself told in the horror mean girls shutter island terms.
i ate it up in two sittings, just couldn't stop. definitely going to read more of her.
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