Status Updates From Empresas y tribulaciones de...

There's nothing here, there'll never be anything here. One day it will disappear without a trace and fill up with roads, factories, people dedicated to working like mules for the empty thing they call progress.

I rarely do this. But I am going to bow out on this one and Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel, both of which I have been reading for months, at a glacial pace. I read the first two novellas, but I am just too bored with the plot and Grossman’s sentences are so repetitive: I found this be true of her translation of Don Quixote as well: Smollet’s is by far the best of the 3 translations I’ve read.

I just finished the second novel in this volume, Llona Cones the Rain. What a gut punch!

I know that these novels are well loved, almost universally. But these stories are melancholic, somber, gloomy tales, not I what expected but enjoyable just the same.

I suspect that the subsequent stories will be more upbeat. We shall see.

This isn’t just one novel: it’s seven. One downside is the extremely tiny font.

I’ve only finished the first, The Snow of the Admiral, a slow burn.

Marqoll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is not only an adventurer; he’s an existential philosopher.

The prose style is ponderous; it flows slowly. I am hesitant to make this comparison, but he reminds me of Thomas Mann.

It may take me a year to read this.