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Harrow
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead , the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
"She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.”
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”?
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
"She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.”
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”?
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2021
452 people are currently reading
13257 people want to read
About the author
Joy Williams
78 books872 followersWilliams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 668 reviews
August 28, 2023
I kept reading. I kept turning pages. My brain unraveled completely.
September 16, 2021
To everyone saying they are too dumb for this book, not necessarily.
Is Harrow a good Joy Williams introduction? No. It is a masterpiece however, as all her work arguably is. I have never casually recommended Joy Williams to anyone. She’s often challenging, and can SEEM nonsensical. To a Joy Williams beginner who I know nothing about their reading preferences or histories, I’d say to start with Breaking and Entering (perhaps my favorite novel ever) or The Quick and the Dead, or better yet The Visiting Privilege - collected stories including 4 collection’s worth. These are easier navigated than the far more challenging Changeling, and one of the single most challenging works I’ve read (I’d put it around the level of Krasznahorkai per difficulty) her debut; State of Grace. I’d place Harrow somewhere around Changeling, as far as the depth of the “fever dream” the reader will experience.
To the skeptical reader I’d say that the method of just letting it wash over you clearly didn’t work, this is one way to read her, the other is to take notes. I have done both with a number of her novels and the more reads the better as well. I’ve just finished my first read of Harrow and I took about 2k words worth of short hand notes. Some I’m sure can read and fully grasp it all in one go, but I find this hard to believe and think people just don’t want to admit that reading can be hard when they’re “big readers” or “smart” people.
Now 2k words of work may sound like more work than you want to do for a 200 pg novel, and that’s fine, Joy certainly wouldn’t care, as with this move probably more than ever at the age of 74, with this, her first novel in 20 years. BUT the entire world of Joy Williams awaits you and is so worth the process it takes you to revel there. But also she’s devastating. I’ve often told friends of mine who’ve inquired about her that her thing is existential dread, wry humor; a fever dream doused in pitch.
As far as actually reviewing this novel, probably gimme a couple years.
Is Harrow a good Joy Williams introduction? No. It is a masterpiece however, as all her work arguably is. I have never casually recommended Joy Williams to anyone. She’s often challenging, and can SEEM nonsensical. To a Joy Williams beginner who I know nothing about their reading preferences or histories, I’d say to start with Breaking and Entering (perhaps my favorite novel ever) or The Quick and the Dead, or better yet The Visiting Privilege - collected stories including 4 collection’s worth. These are easier navigated than the far more challenging Changeling, and one of the single most challenging works I’ve read (I’d put it around the level of Krasznahorkai per difficulty) her debut; State of Grace. I’d place Harrow somewhere around Changeling, as far as the depth of the “fever dream” the reader will experience.
To the skeptical reader I’d say that the method of just letting it wash over you clearly didn’t work, this is one way to read her, the other is to take notes. I have done both with a number of her novels and the more reads the better as well. I’ve just finished my first read of Harrow and I took about 2k words worth of short hand notes. Some I’m sure can read and fully grasp it all in one go, but I find this hard to believe and think people just don’t want to admit that reading can be hard when they’re “big readers” or “smart” people.
Now 2k words of work may sound like more work than you want to do for a 200 pg novel, and that’s fine, Joy certainly wouldn’t care, as with this move probably more than ever at the age of 74, with this, her first novel in 20 years. BUT the entire world of Joy Williams awaits you and is so worth the process it takes you to revel there. But also she’s devastating. I’ve often told friends of mine who’ve inquired about her that her thing is existential dread, wry humor; a fever dream doused in pitch.
As far as actually reviewing this novel, probably gimme a couple years.
Read
October 3, 2021Quirky, off-kilter, irreverent, not quite shocking, perhaps intentionally vague. But enough about me.
There is much to like in this latest novel by Joy Williams. It's dystopian, maybe. There are funny vignettes, but maybe it's the wordplay within that is what makes the humor.
The novel opens, more or less, as a story about Khristen (her father was obsessed with boats, but her mother insisted, at the least, on the first letter "K"). Her mother, crazy like all Williams' mothers, believes Khristen has momentarily died and is thus marked for greatness. She says,
Even if I was mistaken that night and you didn't cross over the shadow line, the borderland, do you ever feel that you have died and are walking among those who might have died as well but are not telling?
Because . . . no one tells.
Portentous.
But nothing in a Williams novel is so straightforward. Slowly, Khristen steps aside as a character, but not before she meets Jeffrey, a precocious ten year-old. Jeffrey is already steeped in the law, spouting legal principles in everyday conversations, and thanks to the time-warp of Williams' writing, becomes a judge. Still ten years-old. But why not? For his tenth birthday, he was given a cake depicting his father's murder. It was Jeffrey's grandfather (tata) who killed his father, the details unclear. It was tata, too, who would read Kafka to Jeffrey at bedtime.
Jeffrey, don't play with your thoughts, his mother said.
So, he had a unique perspective when he sat in his courtroom: Every person under his purview considered themselves unique as snowflakes but in the aggregate they were a blizzard, a whiteout of swirling expectations and denial.
Other characters come and go. There's Foxy: She wondered if his pecker was as shredded and gribbled and nicked as the rest of him or whether it hung wondrously, impossibly smooth and aloof, its head like burled oak. She'd like to coax it out and mock it. Still, Gordon was kind of cool.
Perhaps all humans can be classified as either gribbled and nicked or smooth and aloof. I pondered this, and wondered which category I'd fall in, but now I can't tell you anything else about Foxy and Gordon. It was that kind of reading experience.
Eventually, Khristen seemed to have disappeared, but a first person singular starts talking near book's end. Maybe that's Khristen, who now has become . . .
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
But why harrow? Why call the novel Harrow?
It's not an everyday word for me, so I looked it up, early on. Definitions teach that it's a farming implement made for tilling soil, and it can be noun, verb, adverb, whatever you want. And I supposed that could be some symbolism surely.
But the harrows in this book are, apparently, some form of art placed on the door to houses or other buildings. Like on the cover of this novel. Oh, there's horse symbolism too, but I got stuck on the harrow. I was hoping there'd be some elucidation. There was this:
The harrow had initially been perceived as brutally and blithely indiscriminate, but further studies indicated that those it spared were rigidly optimistic, uninhibited and chary of any devotion. . . . Of course studies were always shifting, changing, coming up with some new angle, affirming the opposite of what they'd just assured everyone about. Now it was being discovered that some were prone to dying from the harrow's requirements after being initially spared.
Perhaps I should stop playing with my thoughts.
There is much to like in this latest novel by Joy Williams. It's dystopian, maybe. There are funny vignettes, but maybe it's the wordplay within that is what makes the humor.
The novel opens, more or less, as a story about Khristen (her father was obsessed with boats, but her mother insisted, at the least, on the first letter "K"). Her mother, crazy like all Williams' mothers, believes Khristen has momentarily died and is thus marked for greatness. She says,
Even if I was mistaken that night and you didn't cross over the shadow line, the borderland, do you ever feel that you have died and are walking among those who might have died as well but are not telling?
Because . . . no one tells.
Portentous.
But nothing in a Williams novel is so straightforward. Slowly, Khristen steps aside as a character, but not before she meets Jeffrey, a precocious ten year-old. Jeffrey is already steeped in the law, spouting legal principles in everyday conversations, and thanks to the time-warp of Williams' writing, becomes a judge. Still ten years-old. But why not? For his tenth birthday, he was given a cake depicting his father's murder. It was Jeffrey's grandfather (tata) who killed his father, the details unclear. It was tata, too, who would read Kafka to Jeffrey at bedtime.
Jeffrey, don't play with your thoughts, his mother said.
So, he had a unique perspective when he sat in his courtroom: Every person under his purview considered themselves unique as snowflakes but in the aggregate they were a blizzard, a whiteout of swirling expectations and denial.
Other characters come and go. There's Foxy: She wondered if his pecker was as shredded and gribbled and nicked as the rest of him or whether it hung wondrously, impossibly smooth and aloof, its head like burled oak. She'd like to coax it out and mock it. Still, Gordon was kind of cool.
Perhaps all humans can be classified as either gribbled and nicked or smooth and aloof. I pondered this, and wondered which category I'd fall in, but now I can't tell you anything else about Foxy and Gordon. It was that kind of reading experience.
Eventually, Khristen seemed to have disappeared, but a first person singular starts talking near book's end. Maybe that's Khristen, who now has become . . .
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
But why harrow? Why call the novel Harrow?
It's not an everyday word for me, so I looked it up, early on. Definitions teach that it's a farming implement made for tilling soil, and it can be noun, verb, adverb, whatever you want. And I supposed that could be some symbolism surely.
But the harrows in this book are, apparently, some form of art placed on the door to houses or other buildings. Like on the cover of this novel. Oh, there's horse symbolism too, but I got stuck on the harrow. I was hoping there'd be some elucidation. There was this:
The harrow had initially been perceived as brutally and blithely indiscriminate, but further studies indicated that those it spared were rigidly optimistic, uninhibited and chary of any devotion. . . . Of course studies were always shifting, changing, coming up with some new angle, affirming the opposite of what they'd just assured everyone about. Now it was being discovered that some were prone to dying from the harrow's requirements after being initially spared.
Perhaps I should stop playing with my thoughts.
March 15, 2022
I have read my share of apocalyptic novels which I really enjoyed: The Road, The Bear, Station Eleven, A Children's Bible,Bewilderment, The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. etc. which I mostly enjoyed. This one, however, just pissed me off. I never found a point to the story, didn't appreciate the writing, found the characters all thinner than a destroyed atmosphere...just did not appreciate much of anything. I get it, we have fucked the planet up and will pay a price. And people are basically nuts. OK, got it. But, what is the point of this particular book with its lack of any narrative structure, its random passages. I mean there is a dark humor to the phrases at times, but not enough of a plot for me to sink my teeth into. And, as pointed out in my first sentence, it isn't like this is ground that no one has attempted to cover before. I don't think this book does a great job with the apocalypse trope. And I truly cannot comprehend how it could have won a Kirkus prize.
As for the other 2021 Kirkus winners, I have read and reviewed The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois which was better than this. I already have My Monticello checked out and have a hold on Harlem Shuffle at my library. I'll add the other two, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories and Bolla to my TBR.
My list of potential Pulitzer's for 2022 - click now to vote for your favorite!
As for the other 2021 Kirkus winners, I have read and reviewed The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois which was better than this. I already have My Monticello checked out and have a hold on Harlem Shuffle at my library. I'll add the other two, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories and Bolla to my TBR.
My list of potential Pulitzer's for 2022 - click now to vote for your favorite!
January 2, 2022
A razor-sharp and nihilistic allegory of environmental collapse, with staggering moments of brilliance, but experimental fiction isn't going to convince anyone to decarbonize the atmosphere. In terms of subject matter and narrative conceit, this is close to Tenth of December-era George Saunders, with a hallucinatory and whacked-out science-fictional premise, but without the empathy or humanism. In terms of dialogue, this reminded me (not fondly) of late-period coasting Don DeLillo: portentous and gnomic pseudophilosophical utterances voiced by characters who all sound virtually identical. This was my first book by Joy Williams, but maybe I should have started with her short story collections instead.
October 14, 2021
Astonishing.
April 27, 2024
26th book for 2024.
Read for the Otherland bookclub. Spoilers follow.
The book is a meditation on humanity's alienation, abuse, and sociopathic relationship with the Natural World.
Harrow as a noun is a farm instrument, used to harrow the fields after plowing. Harrow as a verb means to inflict suffering, and comes from the Norse word for plunder, perhaps taken to England with the Viking invasions. So it's easy to say that the harrow is a farm instrument that literally is plundering/inflicting suffering on Mother Earth. Harrow is also often used to describe the suffering of souls in Hell.
Traditionally, harrows are pulled by horses—and so this gives a nice metaphor for the fusing of the natural world with human technology—and as farming is the most basic technology for creating civilization originally—this fusion can be seen as being foundational to the creation of civilization. In the book, horses no longer exist, and are only mentioned in terms of their absence or abuse. The loneliness of eternity is mentioned as an absence of horses. The book exists at a time when humanity/civilization has profoundly severed any productive ties with the natural world and in fact now actively treats nature as a sociopathic enemy of civilization.
The book is infused with a great deal of Christian, Greek, and other mythologies.
There are two children in the book who are innocent witnesses/judges of what has been wrought on the World by older generations. The first, Kristen—whose name means Follower of Christ—was like Christ, killed and reborn again, and acts as a pilgrim of sorts through the hell/purgatory of the post-apocalyptic World. (The idea of neither being alive/nor dead comes up again at the end of the book when the Kafka character Graccus is discussed by Kristen and the child Jeffrey.)
In the course of her travels, Kristen ends up at a decaying resort on the banks of a dying/dead lake that once was filled with life. The resort is run by Lola, the secret head of a geriatric eco-terrorist group. The name Lola, comes from the Spanish 'Nuestra Señora de los Dolores'—which is the title in Catholicism for Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. Our Lady of Sorrows has traditionally seven sorrows—a number Lola has trouble keeping track of—the last four relating specifically to the Crucifixion of Christ.
Lola tells Kristen that according to Hindu belief, when you die you wake up in Heaven, but are surrounded by your enemies—all your friends are in the darkness of Hell. The trick, she says, is you have to quickly say you would prefer to be dead in Hell with your friends, than alive in Heaven with your enemies. Once you do this everything changes and you end up somewhere better. If you forget to do this—and who would want to go to Hell?—then you have to wait until the next time around.
The eco-terrorist actions are both symbolic, grandiose, and ineffectual. The old people carrying them out—from the generation that destroyed the World, and whose backstories are anything but noble—do not change anything. I first read this as a sort of negative indictment of the ability of actions to change the World, but I now think this is much more in line with them partaking in acts of symbolic penance—perhaps to escape purgatory (as Lola says you just have to say you want to be with your friends in Hell).
The final part of the book finds Kristen in a town, where she meets the child Jeffrey again (whose name means God is Peace) and who is judging the eco-sins of the adults of the town. Within the town, there is one final enormous tree, which Jeffrey says is all that remains of what was once a sacred grove, a temenos—specifically a place fenced off from humans and sacred to the Gods. On the final page of the book, the tree is uprooted and removed to make way for a sports center.
There was some debate in the book club about whether this post-natural civilization is sustainable. Given that Jeffrey changes his name to Enoch, who was so beloved by God that he was taken to heaven before he died and was the Biblical father of Noah, my guess is that this post-natural civilization's longevity is limited.
4-stars
Read for the Otherland bookclub. Spoilers follow.
The book is a meditation on humanity's alienation, abuse, and sociopathic relationship with the Natural World.
Harrow as a noun is a farm instrument, used to harrow the fields after plowing. Harrow as a verb means to inflict suffering, and comes from the Norse word for plunder, perhaps taken to England with the Viking invasions. So it's easy to say that the harrow is a farm instrument that literally is plundering/inflicting suffering on Mother Earth. Harrow is also often used to describe the suffering of souls in Hell.
Traditionally, harrows are pulled by horses—and so this gives a nice metaphor for the fusing of the natural world with human technology—and as farming is the most basic technology for creating civilization originally—this fusion can be seen as being foundational to the creation of civilization. In the book, horses no longer exist, and are only mentioned in terms of their absence or abuse. The loneliness of eternity is mentioned as an absence of horses. The book exists at a time when humanity/civilization has profoundly severed any productive ties with the natural world and in fact now actively treats nature as a sociopathic enemy of civilization.
The book is infused with a great deal of Christian, Greek, and other mythologies.
There are two children in the book who are innocent witnesses/judges of what has been wrought on the World by older generations. The first, Kristen—whose name means Follower of Christ—was like Christ, killed and reborn again, and acts as a pilgrim of sorts through the hell/purgatory of the post-apocalyptic World. (The idea of neither being alive/nor dead comes up again at the end of the book when the Kafka character Graccus is discussed by Kristen and the child Jeffrey.)
In the course of her travels, Kristen ends up at a decaying resort on the banks of a dying/dead lake that once was filled with life. The resort is run by Lola, the secret head of a geriatric eco-terrorist group. The name Lola, comes from the Spanish 'Nuestra Señora de los Dolores'—which is the title in Catholicism for Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. Our Lady of Sorrows has traditionally seven sorrows—a number Lola has trouble keeping track of—the last four relating specifically to the Crucifixion of Christ.
Lola tells Kristen that according to Hindu belief, when you die you wake up in Heaven, but are surrounded by your enemies—all your friends are in the darkness of Hell. The trick, she says, is you have to quickly say you would prefer to be dead in Hell with your friends, than alive in Heaven with your enemies. Once you do this everything changes and you end up somewhere better. If you forget to do this—and who would want to go to Hell?—then you have to wait until the next time around.
The eco-terrorist actions are both symbolic, grandiose, and ineffectual. The old people carrying them out—from the generation that destroyed the World, and whose backstories are anything but noble—do not change anything. I first read this as a sort of negative indictment of the ability of actions to change the World, but I now think this is much more in line with them partaking in acts of symbolic penance—perhaps to escape purgatory (as Lola says you just have to say you want to be with your friends in Hell).
The final part of the book finds Kristen in a town, where she meets the child Jeffrey again (whose name means God is Peace) and who is judging the eco-sins of the adults of the town. Within the town, there is one final enormous tree, which Jeffrey says is all that remains of what was once a sacred grove, a temenos—specifically a place fenced off from humans and sacred to the Gods. On the final page of the book, the tree is uprooted and removed to make way for a sports center.
There was some debate in the book club about whether this post-natural civilization is sustainable. Given that Jeffrey changes his name to Enoch, who was so beloved by God that he was taken to heaven before he died and was the Biblical father of Noah, my guess is that this post-natural civilization's longevity is limited.
4-stars
March 31, 2023
“I felt the story was revelatory while being impossible to interpret”
Yeah…I think “Harrow” is fantastic. I didn’t really understand a lot of it, but I’m pretty sure it was fantastic.
“I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It'll be around but it will become less and less until it's finally compatible with our feelings for it.”
I find this worldview really resonant. Harrow is post-apocalypse in the sense that the apocalypse is happening all around us everyday and our response is generally apathetic. The world of Harrow is a believable one. Humanity has found a a way to persist in the face of fallout, at the expense of all other life on Earth. So the book wants you to feel guilty, but it takes time to make you laugh, and to think hard as well, amidst that guilt-trip.
"In tragedy, everything has happened before it begins. The messenger appears and relates the circumstances of death, the violence of which is seldom portrayed upon the stage. This in itself is a deliberate rejection of opportunity, theatrical opportunity. The messenger is nobody but he holds all the cards, man."
And I think the protagonist of Harrow is dead, or maybe all the characters are dead - there’s a Kafka short story that frames the last third and the context seems to suggest that’s the case. Or maybe the whole book takes place in that space where death is palpable but not finalized, like a glass knocked off a table but not yet shattered - one of the many recurrent, clearly symbolic, yet also elusive visuals that make up “Harrow” and skirt my ability to really understand.
Yeah…I think “Harrow” is fantastic. I didn’t really understand a lot of it, but I’m pretty sure it was fantastic.
“I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It'll be around but it will become less and less until it's finally compatible with our feelings for it.”
I find this worldview really resonant. Harrow is post-apocalypse in the sense that the apocalypse is happening all around us everyday and our response is generally apathetic. The world of Harrow is a believable one. Humanity has found a a way to persist in the face of fallout, at the expense of all other life on Earth. So the book wants you to feel guilty, but it takes time to make you laugh, and to think hard as well, amidst that guilt-trip.
"In tragedy, everything has happened before it begins. The messenger appears and relates the circumstances of death, the violence of which is seldom portrayed upon the stage. This in itself is a deliberate rejection of opportunity, theatrical opportunity. The messenger is nobody but he holds all the cards, man."
And I think the protagonist of Harrow is dead, or maybe all the characters are dead - there’s a Kafka short story that frames the last third and the context seems to suggest that’s the case. Or maybe the whole book takes place in that space where death is palpable but not finalized, like a glass knocked off a table but not yet shattered - one of the many recurrent, clearly symbolic, yet also elusive visuals that make up “Harrow” and skirt my ability to really understand.
November 25, 2021
This is an experimental novel, and the thing about experiments is that mostly they fail, those failures are the way we guide ourselves to success. I see what Williams was shooting for here, but this is a failure. Williams' has often focused on environmental collapse in her work, a topic that is now de rigueur. In Harrow it is the end of the world, adults are crazy (they know what is lost but seem unable to face the fact they squandered it) and turn instead to ridiculous belief systems and spend time working on teaching themselves to embrace entropy. Williams is clearly reaching for a sly end-of-times humor which, in my opinion, she never gets a hold of. Of Williams' books I have only read Escapes, a collection of Williams' short stories (which impressed me on the whole) so maybe this is what a Williams novel looks like and she is just not the writer for me. The prose is interesting but clunky, as if it needs a couple more edits, the messaging is so far (I quit at the 38% mark) clunkier than the prose. I cringed when the wise ass child lamented extinction of the polar bears and her mother's response was to scoff and argue that losing the polar bears doesn't matter at all and to say something like "when is the last time a polar bear wrote a good book?" Puhleez. Maybe that will have them rolling in the English Department meeting, but it showed me a writer who doesn't know people well enough to satirize them. I enjoyed the idea of the mother who lived to convince others that her entirely ordinary child was something special and dedicated herself to proving wrong every other human on the planet, all of whom confirmed her typicality.
I mean, maybe its me, but I could not convince myself finishing would be a good use of my time.
I mean, maybe its me, but I could not convince myself finishing would be a good use of my time.
November 29, 2021
They did not consider themselves 'terrorists,' reserving that word for the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.
November 4, 2021
I thought Williams's The Changeling was one of a kind, but Harrow is in a new category. It's a dark, lashing, bitterly funny text--a novel shaped more by scene and koan than narrative. How can a writer relay the story of a destroyed world, after all? I'm a deep fan of Williams's short stories. And I thought The Quick and the Dead was a mordant masterwork. But this book is kin to Kafka or Krasznahorkai and other unflinching observers of human rubble. Harsh. Startling. It will make you question every assumption you have about righteousness and creature comfort. An unforgiving (in the best sense) work of art.
January 2, 2022
This book makes me feel like I didn’t pay attention on a really good or bad acid trip and therefore I have nothing to impart to you from said trip. Much like 2021.
August 19, 2022
Almost every day I feel guilty. I felt guilty when I watered the dropping hydrangeas during the 95 degree heat wave and I feel guilty when I purchase foods packaged in plastic. I feel guilty when a new purchase is delivered to our door and when I throw out a product I hadn’t used up but don’t like.
Sure, I have recycled for fifty years, eat vegetarian at least 60% of the time, organic garden and buy from a local farmer. We turned in a three year lease car with only $8,000 miles total on it. We insulated the house and upgraded the windows and appliances.
Nothing is enough. Humanity has used and abused the world for our own selfish comfort and the consequences are unavoidable. It’s already happening.
Despair, they explained to me, was caused by the attempt to live a life of virtue, justice and understanding. Despair arose when one tried to understand and justify human existence and behavior.
from Harrow by Joy Williams
I see people all around who seem to ignore what is happening, who live the lifestyle they feel they have earned. Why don’t I just stop thinking about it? Live the life I earned? Spend our money without regret? I could pity the children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of our generation and call it enough.
I was hesitant when I picked up Joy Williams’ Harrow. I knew she was a challenging writer. I found it transformative. It was like going through the looking-glass into a world where conventional novelistic norms don’t apply. I had to look up snippets of quotes and the Kafka story The Hunter Gracchus that informs the third part of the book.
The novel is a mindboggling, emotional ride into a house of horrors that flays open humanity’s original sin of self-centered narcissism.
In a near-future world without trees, animals, or clean water, a girl leaves her school to seek her mother, traveling though a blasted landscape and encountering bizarre communities of people. Gangs of youth. Elderly planning terrorist acts against the criminals of the environmental collapse.
…for all intents and purposes, the apocalypse had pretty much occurred. The incomprehensible beauty of nature was no more, but most had accepted the destruction done in their name. It was over and now it could begin, was the way those on the outside justified their refreshed complacency.
from Harrow by Joy Williams
Khristen is our innocent, who as a child had died and returned to life, or so her mother believed. She is neither dead nor alive to her mother. She was sent away to school and at the collapse went on the road to find her mother at the last place she knew she had been. Arriving at the resort, run by Lola and Gordon, her mother long gone, she stays for a while among the elderly intent on acts of terrorism against the enemies of nature.
Before he disappeared, Gordon and Lol had been reading Joseph Conrad, and Williams inserts a sentence fragment: “the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.” I put the sentence into the search bar and up came Henry James–An Appreciation, 1905. I read the document. And read it again. And its words haunted me into my dreams.
Conrad wrote that Henry James’ work shows no “suggestions of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender,” until the “brutality of our common fate” brings an end. Then, Conrad imagines the end of the world, “when the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth,” thinking of the last artist alive who will be there to speak. And then comes that sentence, that the last words from the last artist will offer inconceivable hope, will “not know when it is beaten.” My head was spinning, synapses lighting up, trying to encompass what I was reading. Fiction, Conrad tells us, is nearer truth than history.
I am still grappling with that essay, and with Harrow. Instead of mourning what was lost, Williams offers a world that has embraced an attitude of anti-nature, ready to chop down the last tree, not loving the world becoming a freedom. It is our ordained future, based on humanity’s fatal flaw that has brought us to this point?
We look at what we have wrought. Can we punish those responsible? Can we atone? Can we maintain consumerism and heal the wounds at the same time? Is it too late? Can the pens of our artists offer hope?
The questions are raised. How will we answer?
Thank you to #VintageAnchor for a #freebook.
Sure, I have recycled for fifty years, eat vegetarian at least 60% of the time, organic garden and buy from a local farmer. We turned in a three year lease car with only $8,000 miles total on it. We insulated the house and upgraded the windows and appliances.
Nothing is enough. Humanity has used and abused the world for our own selfish comfort and the consequences are unavoidable. It’s already happening.
Despair, they explained to me, was caused by the attempt to live a life of virtue, justice and understanding. Despair arose when one tried to understand and justify human existence and behavior.
from Harrow by Joy Williams
I see people all around who seem to ignore what is happening, who live the lifestyle they feel they have earned. Why don’t I just stop thinking about it? Live the life I earned? Spend our money without regret? I could pity the children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of our generation and call it enough.
I was hesitant when I picked up Joy Williams’ Harrow. I knew she was a challenging writer. I found it transformative. It was like going through the looking-glass into a world where conventional novelistic norms don’t apply. I had to look up snippets of quotes and the Kafka story The Hunter Gracchus that informs the third part of the book.
The novel is a mindboggling, emotional ride into a house of horrors that flays open humanity’s original sin of self-centered narcissism.
In a near-future world without trees, animals, or clean water, a girl leaves her school to seek her mother, traveling though a blasted landscape and encountering bizarre communities of people. Gangs of youth. Elderly planning terrorist acts against the criminals of the environmental collapse.
…for all intents and purposes, the apocalypse had pretty much occurred. The incomprehensible beauty of nature was no more, but most had accepted the destruction done in their name. It was over and now it could begin, was the way those on the outside justified their refreshed complacency.
from Harrow by Joy Williams
Khristen is our innocent, who as a child had died and returned to life, or so her mother believed. She is neither dead nor alive to her mother. She was sent away to school and at the collapse went on the road to find her mother at the last place she knew she had been. Arriving at the resort, run by Lola and Gordon, her mother long gone, she stays for a while among the elderly intent on acts of terrorism against the enemies of nature.
Before he disappeared, Gordon and Lol had been reading Joseph Conrad, and Williams inserts a sentence fragment: “the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.” I put the sentence into the search bar and up came Henry James–An Appreciation, 1905. I read the document. And read it again. And its words haunted me into my dreams.
Conrad wrote that Henry James’ work shows no “suggestions of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender,” until the “brutality of our common fate” brings an end. Then, Conrad imagines the end of the world, “when the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth,” thinking of the last artist alive who will be there to speak. And then comes that sentence, that the last words from the last artist will offer inconceivable hope, will “not know when it is beaten.” My head was spinning, synapses lighting up, trying to encompass what I was reading. Fiction, Conrad tells us, is nearer truth than history.
I am still grappling with that essay, and with Harrow. Instead of mourning what was lost, Williams offers a world that has embraced an attitude of anti-nature, ready to chop down the last tree, not loving the world becoming a freedom. It is our ordained future, based on humanity’s fatal flaw that has brought us to this point?
We look at what we have wrought. Can we punish those responsible? Can we atone? Can we maintain consumerism and heal the wounds at the same time? Is it too late? Can the pens of our artists offer hope?
The questions are raised. How will we answer?
Thank you to #VintageAnchor for a #freebook.
June 22, 2022
My review of Harrow has been published online at Rain Taxi:
https://www.raintaxi.com/harrow/
https://www.raintaxi.com/harrow/
December 25, 2021
Not my cup of tea.
I won't attempt to explain why this didn't work for me, because that would assume I could put my finger on the specific cause of my frustration and disappointment.
Full disclosure:: I consume a rather healthy quantity of - and I'm familiar with many of the more popular works in - not only speculative fiction and dystopia, but also conventional literary fiction (e.g., the kind of stuff that wins Booker, Pulitzer, or National Book awards/prizes). Yet this pushed none of my buttons.
Particularly to the extent that some have raved about it, and it came to me highly recommended, I can only assume I wasn't the target audience.
After I finished the book, I read a few (lengthy, serious) reviews of the book - and I saw/found no consensus among the literati, which didn't make me feel any better or worse about my experience with the book.
Having said all of that, it was relatively short, some of the writing was nice, some of the passages were interesting.... but, the whole ... nah, ... it didn't reach me at all.
I won't attempt to explain why this didn't work for me, because that would assume I could put my finger on the specific cause of my frustration and disappointment.
Full disclosure:: I consume a rather healthy quantity of - and I'm familiar with many of the more popular works in - not only speculative fiction and dystopia, but also conventional literary fiction (e.g., the kind of stuff that wins Booker, Pulitzer, or National Book awards/prizes). Yet this pushed none of my buttons.
Particularly to the extent that some have raved about it, and it came to me highly recommended, I can only assume I wasn't the target audience.
After I finished the book, I read a few (lengthy, serious) reviews of the book - and I saw/found no consensus among the literati, which didn't make me feel any better or worse about my experience with the book.
Having said all of that, it was relatively short, some of the writing was nice, some of the passages were interesting.... but, the whole ... nah, ... it didn't reach me at all.
April 22, 2021
“She was losing nerve-cell population daily. Everyone was. The last physician she had gone to said it wasn’t an acute problem. We have more nerve cells than we ever employ. Massive loss is not unacceptable, he assured her. He compared it to the amount of ink that can fade from a written message without changing what it says. She had found this charming. But there comes a moment when the message changes or becomes unintelligible or both, doesn’t it doctor? she had said. And he had smiled and said, Of course.”
May 21, 2022
An alternately angry and playful examination of life after the ecological collapse of the planet. The prose is dense as a neutron star and the wordplay is cutting and laugh out loud funny at times too. However, the book is almost completely without plot, and I found the Christian symbology overdone.
Glad to have been exposed to Williams’ work, even if this book was not completely enjoyable.
Glad to have been exposed to Williams’ work, even if this book was not completely enjoyable.
July 7, 2024
Joy Williams has been writing personal apocalypses for 50 years. Here, the devastation extends over the whole waning biosphere in collapse, but it’s no less personal anyway.
Khristen is a teenager set adrift when her boarding school abruptly closes and disperses due to a lack of an incoming class or any hope in a future for which the youth may be prepared. Her mother, obsessed all her life with the idea that Khristen died briefly as an infant and so glimpsed the afterlife, has vanished, and Khristen wanders a wasted landscape before settling in a kind of dilapidated rest home for avenging elderly who aspire to yet accomplishing something with their expiring breaths. Like everything else, though, it's probably too late. Khristen may not have seen beyond the veil, but everyone's living there now, plodding through their own afterlives, largely beyond even seeking a justification for continued existence besides habit. Humans are tenacious and self-involved, the only renewal on offer seems to eschew what little might remain of the natural world in favor of an even more total Anthropocene. In this penultimate decade (our own, not the story's) before an even more irrevocable tipping point, Joy Williams reemerges with her first novel in twenty years, bitter, black-humored, but with enough hope left to care for the fate of our collective soul and to imagine the use of publishing such a screed. Line-by-line, this might be her sharpest yet, with perfectly-shaped aphorisms and epigrams fitted into observational description and razor dialogue alike. Bleak insights flicker in the periphery of every derelict motel. Many Williams protagonists are empty containers for their contexts, but Khristen is unique among them, a mirror but also a sensitive receiver. She has the adaptability of a Ballard lead, but not the corruptibly. There's a steadiness and resolve about her yet. I'd like to spend more time with her. But what time do we have? You could take this as Williams' own last self-immolatory molotov into the works of devouring late capitalism, but in fact she's not done and a new collection appeared just five days ago. May we yet listen and shift our paths.
Khristen is a teenager set adrift when her boarding school abruptly closes and disperses due to a lack of an incoming class or any hope in a future for which the youth may be prepared. Her mother, obsessed all her life with the idea that Khristen died briefly as an infant and so glimpsed the afterlife, has vanished, and Khristen wanders a wasted landscape before settling in a kind of dilapidated rest home for avenging elderly who aspire to yet accomplishing something with their expiring breaths. Like everything else, though, it's probably too late. Khristen may not have seen beyond the veil, but everyone's living there now, plodding through their own afterlives, largely beyond even seeking a justification for continued existence besides habit. Humans are tenacious and self-involved, the only renewal on offer seems to eschew what little might remain of the natural world in favor of an even more total Anthropocene. In this penultimate decade (our own, not the story's) before an even more irrevocable tipping point, Joy Williams reemerges with her first novel in twenty years, bitter, black-humored, but with enough hope left to care for the fate of our collective soul and to imagine the use of publishing such a screed. Line-by-line, this might be her sharpest yet, with perfectly-shaped aphorisms and epigrams fitted into observational description and razor dialogue alike. Bleak insights flicker in the periphery of every derelict motel. Many Williams protagonists are empty containers for their contexts, but Khristen is unique among them, a mirror but also a sensitive receiver. She has the adaptability of a Ballard lead, but not the corruptibly. There's a steadiness and resolve about her yet. I'd like to spend more time with her. But what time do we have? You could take this as Williams' own last self-immolatory molotov into the works of devouring late capitalism, but in fact she's not done and a new collection appeared just five days ago. May we yet listen and shift our paths.
Read
August 25, 2022
I felt the story was revelatory while being impossible to interpret.
Khristen and Jeffrey are discussing Kafka's short story The Hunter Gracchus here, but it might well be said of Harrow itself, indeed is it meant as a warning? Don't try too hard, like K & J (also the initials of myself and my only brother, is this a sign?) to explain away all the details, that way madness lies? But out of habit, you know, because I'm a good girl who does her homework, I did get to wondering if the frequent reference to The Hunter Gracchus might offer some kind of key. So, off I went to the study and had to wade through several double rows, but yes, I found my Sämtliche Erzählungen and indeed within it Der Jäger Gracchus and dutifully read said short story. And yes, there you go. Gracchus washes up on a strange shore (Khristen wondered about the fifty boys: I wondered about why the the fruit merchant was lying next to his wares) laid out on a bier because he is dead, as he informs the mayor of Riva, yes, he is definitely dead, but his bark is off course and wandering at the mercy of the wind that blows from the deepest regions of the dead. Aha. So maybe Khristen really did die as a baby and cross to the other side and this whole story is her journey thereafter, but, unlike Gracchus, she doesn't realise that she's dead.
Well, it works for me.
I mean I still couldn't begin to interpret the symbolism of the harrow. Which is the title after all.
But that's my idea: this is Alice's, or rather Khristen’s adventures in the Afterlife.
We all lead three lives. The true one, the false one, and the one that we are not aware of. See how easy that was?
Khristen and Jeffrey are discussing Kafka's short story The Hunter Gracchus here, but it might well be said of Harrow itself, indeed is it meant as a warning? Don't try too hard, like K & J (also the initials of myself and my only brother, is this a sign?) to explain away all the details, that way madness lies? But out of habit, you know, because I'm a good girl who does her homework, I did get to wondering if the frequent reference to The Hunter Gracchus might offer some kind of key. So, off I went to the study and had to wade through several double rows, but yes, I found my Sämtliche Erzählungen and indeed within it Der Jäger Gracchus and dutifully read said short story. And yes, there you go. Gracchus washes up on a strange shore (Khristen wondered about the fifty boys: I wondered about why the the fruit merchant was lying next to his wares) laid out on a bier because he is dead, as he informs the mayor of Riva, yes, he is definitely dead, but his bark is off course and wandering at the mercy of the wind that blows from the deepest regions of the dead. Aha. So maybe Khristen really did die as a baby and cross to the other side and this whole story is her journey thereafter, but, unlike Gracchus, she doesn't realise that she's dead.
Well, it works for me.
I mean I still couldn't begin to interpret the symbolism of the harrow. Which is the title after all.
But that's my idea: this is Alice's, or rather Khristen’s adventures in the Afterlife.
We all lead three lives. The true one, the false one, and the one that we are not aware of. See how easy that was?
August 8, 2023
Except for Pynchon, I don’t think there’s a living American author I’d be more excited about dropping a new novel than Joy Williams, and Harrow, her first in twenty-one years, is certainly a Joy Williams novel: dead parents, precocious children, ephemeral feeling of unease, and of course her unequaled feral-desert-monk prose. Here she has pared all this down. Everything is loose and wispy, time is confused and unsure, just as it should be in a world that goes on after it has ended. Williams’ touch is as light as it is masterful. What more can she say? She has been saying it all along. A (final?) wave of the hand, bleak as bones bleached by the sun.
November 1, 2021
This was my first experience reading Joy Williams, and I immediately connected with her unmatched, unapologetic, scathing wit. Her writing is smart, taut, philosophically fluent, and laser-focused on a world in environmental, political, and social chaos. The author slaps us down into a blistering post-apocalyptic setting, and intentionally immerses us in the kind of unfamiliar absurdity which causes nervous uncomfortable laughter. The atmospheric disarray is exceeded only by the increasingly jumbled thoughts of the characters. It is, in a word, brilliant.
October 16, 2021
This was gothic, witty, spooky, very confusing, very disorienting, very challenging, felt like I was in a haze, kind of have a headache now, please don't ask me what this book was about, I don't really know. Now it's time to Google "harrow joy williams ending what does it mean."
June 5, 2021
perfect writer perfect book
June 7, 2022
Occasionally I come to the end of a book with no real idea of what it was about or what it amounts to. This is one such. I waited for Harrow to make some sense to me, but by the end it had not. Reading it was like attending a very high-brow play:
This simultaneous under- and over-explanation cancels itself out. Although I've read a great many apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, I could distil very little meaning from this one. I do not expect fiction to make everything explicit, but do generally anticipate being able to identify some sort of plot and maybe a theme or two. What I did gather is that Harrow takes place in a collapsed and decaying America. Some young people are taking on adult responsibilities and some of the elderly turning to terrorism. Everyone talks in a gnomic and affected manner all the time regardless of age; there is a great deal of dialogue. The title presumably refers to both the noun and verb forms of the word. The noun appears without explanation as a decorative motif, while the verb could describe what is implied to be happening to the world and people in general.
At first I thought I understood what was going on: a teenage (I think?) girl was searching for her mother (or maybe not?) and encountering various strange people on her journey. Before I could grasp what was going on with this girl, though, the perspective shifted several times to even more confusing individuals. Minor events occur seemingly at random and there are strange details, but they aren't weird enough to be striking or seem significant. Near the end, the main child characters seem to be critiquing (or defending?) the novel they're in:
I am giving Harrow two stars on the basis of disappointment. I hoped to find insight then was left disorientated and irritated. It could be a brilliant literary exposition of disaster that I'm simply not on the right wavelength for or a baffling bunch of literary waffle. On a pettier note, the hardback edition I got from the library is printed with unpleasant-smelling ink. Normally I love the ink scent of a new book. Whatever happened here, I seem unable to either understand or appreciate it.
She saw Jeffrey [aged 10 or 11] pacing before it.
"Legal fictions," he was saying, "A legal fiction has allowed the court to attribute legal personhood not just to autonomous non-conscious nonsentient humans but to trusts, corporations, religious idols, and ships."
"Hi, Jeffrey."
He paused and looked at her. "I'm going to be a judge, you know."
"Why not," she said agreeably.
"Are you an inhabitant of here or there? My mother says you give her the creeps."
Khristen laughed.
"It's not a laughing matter, you know. Very little is. Still, you're correct in dismissing her opinion of you. It's my opinion of you that matters and I haven't formed one yet. I find you... opaque. Of course the whole situation is opaque. I expected more incandescence. But I'm just a child. Naive in many ways."
"Jeffrey!" his mother called from a plaid lounger. "Get over here this minute!"
"My mother..." he began, "...should be viewed in these circumstances much as the post-disaster present should be understood in relation to the pre-disaster past. She is behaving unsympathetically and without a shred of compassion or consideration but..."
"Jeffrey! Get your bottom over here now!"
Jeffrey sighed. "Excuse me a sec."
This simultaneous under- and over-explanation cancels itself out. Although I've read a great many apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, I could distil very little meaning from this one. I do not expect fiction to make everything explicit, but do generally anticipate being able to identify some sort of plot and maybe a theme or two. What I did gather is that Harrow takes place in a collapsed and decaying America. Some young people are taking on adult responsibilities and some of the elderly turning to terrorism. Everyone talks in a gnomic and affected manner all the time regardless of age; there is a great deal of dialogue. The title presumably refers to both the noun and verb forms of the word. The noun appears without explanation as a decorative motif, while the verb could describe what is implied to be happening to the world and people in general.
At first I thought I understood what was going on: a teenage (I think?) girl was searching for her mother (or maybe not?) and encountering various strange people on her journey. Before I could grasp what was going on with this girl, though, the perspective shifted several times to even more confusing individuals. Minor events occur seemingly at random and there are strange details, but they aren't weird enough to be striking or seem significant. Near the end, the main child characters seem to be critiquing (or defending?) the novel they're in:
I read [a Kafka short story] carefully. I said, "There's much that seems unnecessary."
"Yes, it takes a while to get going, doesn't it. The hordes of children, the doves, the offal and the fruit skins lying about, the crowds dithering around the waterfront, the awkward floor plan of the yellowish two-storied house..."
[...]
I read more easily now but with less assurance.
"What do you think?" Jeffrey asked.
"Nothing further is revealed here," I replied. "The questioner is no longer an official greeter but a businessman who boards the ship out of curiosity. He seems most intent on informing Gracchus that no-one thinks about him, that he is not a subject that is discussed."
"Is that true? Why would this be so?"
"Because thinking about him resolves nothing. Because life is brief. It's as much as one can do just to get oneself through it. That's one of the explanations provided, anyway."
"What does the questioner, this curiosity-seeker, want here, anyway?"
"Coherence. A coherent story."
"And Gracchus mocks him for that, doesn't he. What does Gracchus want?"
[...]
I felt the story was revelatory while being impossible to interpret. "Gracchus' death is incomplete," I offered. "In my situation it is my birth."
"No, no," he said.
I am giving Harrow two stars on the basis of disappointment. I hoped to find insight then was left disorientated and irritated. It could be a brilliant literary exposition of disaster that I'm simply not on the right wavelength for or a baffling bunch of literary waffle. On a pettier note, the hardback edition I got from the library is printed with unpleasant-smelling ink. Normally I love the ink scent of a new book. Whatever happened here, I seem unable to either understand or appreciate it.
April 22, 2024
Okay... yeah... Ummm... I get what this was going for and it was really fascinating at times, but I found it difficult when there was no actual narrative and it was all satire all the time. There are a lot of ideas here, great ones, but I think I needed something more tangible to carry me with it and keep invested. As it is, it lost me a bit along the way.
It does have interesting commentary on the state of the world today, on caring and apathy, on the point of fighting and on many (too many, maybe?) current issues. Might give it another read or might think more about it until book club on Friday.
It does have interesting commentary on the state of the world today, on caring and apathy, on the point of fighting and on many (too many, maybe?) current issues. Might give it another read or might think more about it until book club on Friday.
April 11, 2022
It's a privilege to sit and watch as a writer of genius completely loses her shit while simultaneously remaining 100% in control. A catastrophic privilege. If I felt out of my depth at times, that was surely part of the plan. The concept of purgatory may be comprehensible but the experience of it is not. Civilisation ditto.
November 14, 2021
Winner of the prestigious Kirkus Prize, this book was an interesting read rather than an enjoyable one. Just too damn bleak and confusing, and really too erudite for me to appreciate on a single read. I am humbled as a reader.
April 26, 2024
It's a story of lost and confused people living in a lost and confused world. It seems to take place after a climate disaster, but it's not entirely clear how different this world is, if at all, from the world that we live in now. There are discrete stories within the bigger narrative that make some limited sense and there are recurring characters whose later experiences are affected by their prior ones, but otherwise there is little continuity and not much overall coherence. The characters live in a chaotic world, but they are the agents of the chaos as well as being its victims. I kept looking for greater connections, but sometimes the solution to a puzzle is that the pieces don't fit together. Incoherence is the answer. The thing that made it all work for me was the pervasive humor and irony that keep me smiling as I watched the world go down the drain.
In the final section there is a discussion of Kafka's story, The Hunter Gracchus, which seems to be as good a metaphor for the world of Harrow as any -- a story of a person whose ship got lost, so that he is caught in between life and death in an incomprehensibly absurd dream world. I really must read the Kafka story, and I see in Wikipedia that The Hunter Gracchus is also part of the fabric of WG Sebald's Vertigo. I must read that one too.
In the final section there is a discussion of Kafka's story, The Hunter Gracchus, which seems to be as good a metaphor for the world of Harrow as any -- a story of a person whose ship got lost, so that he is caught in between life and death in an incomprehensibly absurd dream world. I really must read the Kafka story, and I see in Wikipedia that The Hunter Gracchus is also part of the fabric of WG Sebald's Vertigo. I must read that one too.
December 17, 2021
Well this book is certainly words on a page. Basically no sentence relates to the one before or after it - just complete random stream of consciousness. Every character speaks in the same voice, and every conversation is just characters talking at each other. People may use this book to feel smart but for me it was a waste of time:
"A bark," Jeffrey said. "The vessel is a bark."
"A bark, rather."
"A bark needs winds, an ark not necessarily. What is a chamois?"
GIRL WHAT.
"A bark," Jeffrey said. "The vessel is a bark."
"A bark, rather."
"A bark needs winds, an ark not necessarily. What is a chamois?"
GIRL WHAT.
May 10, 2022
Yeah, I'm done. DNF.
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