Telemachus > Recent Status Updates

This book is such a delight, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to reading it

Jerott and Marthe are back, I swear this book is going to be the end of me

“Welcome To The Black Parade” by MCR is about Will and his father now, I’ve decided

I strongly suspect that chapter 28 is going to live rent free in my brain for a long time

I keep waiting for this to actually diverge from the plot of The Name of the Wind in some significant way, but alas

It feels like everyone in this is extremely online in a very «millennial tumblr queer» kind of way, and I have yet to decide if this is a good thing or not

Take a shot every time Fukuyama says «patrimonial»

Everything here is made ten times better by Nabokov snarking in the translator’s notes

This, for me, is a bit like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life: An artistically dazzling novel that moves you along with the force of its own sense of profundity. And yet in some ways it simply falls flat because I just don’t share that pessimism

Genuinely not sure if the narrative self-awareness is what saves this from being absolutely insufferable, or if the very same self-awareness contributes to a kind of wanky, smug insufferableness

Still on the fence about whether my discomfort from reading this is the result of authorial intent, because I suspect that Pfeijffer is both talented and self-aware enough to do this on purpose as part of the point he is making, or if the whole effect was entirely unintentional on his part. Guess what I’m saying is that I’m still not entirely sure what kind of book this is meant to be and how deep the irony goes

Enjoying it so far, but Raskolnikov as a character really stresses me out

This does exactly what all my favourite history books does: it interrogates how society’s narrative about the historical events was constructed as they happened, and talks about the reasons why one narrative «won» over the other, alternative interpretations

«Everything seems sad this autumn. I wonder if it is a sign of age — I have always liked the spring, and this is the first time I have understood the autumn»

If this book mentions one more time how Daphne is «not like the other girls» or how she only knows things because she «has four brothers» …

Oh the things I do for my book club

Certain jarringly awkward descriptions of sex detract somewhat from my overall enjoyment of the novel. Please tell me why Pfeijffer thought it was a good idea to write the sentence «I fitted inside her like an adult finger in a baby’s fist»

«[Kutscher] was a good friend to us moderns, and every week would invite us to a café where Thomas Mann, Karl Henckell and Max Halbe read to us from their works»

Literally the dream

«That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us»
Julian Barnes is inside my brain picking sentences out of it and putting them in his book

This is so wild and it’s not even 1917 yet

«Vera’s observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most of her observations, this one made everyone feel awkward»

I don’t know if I’m actually enjoying this as a story or if I’m just enjoying the feeling of reading something light and fast-paced for a change

«I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory»

Every time I think this can’t get any more unhinged, it does

«It takes a lot of strength to betray your teacher. I’m so proud of you»
«I did have a pretty good teacher to betray»

Hello???

«Frankly, [spoiler], if Darcy really thinks you’re the lesser of two evils they need to reread Faust»
:)))

“… he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you”

Alright, it’s getting vaguely better now that plot is actually happening

I feel like my first tip-off that this was going to be shite, was the Daily Mail quote on the cover calling it «Utterly brilliant»

Something about the prose here really gets on my nerves after two and a half book of it