Rambling Raconteur > Recent Status Updates

It is increasingly clear that this was the first serious foray into what would emerge with his magnificent 1980s novels and ultimately Underworld. It suffers from a close comparison to those books, but plenty of writers never produce anything this menacing.

A dress rehearsal for DeLillo’s greater novels in terms of theme, setting, and dialogue so far. The prologue was strangely unnerving.

Nashe wrote with bursts of language. Those who love Joyce should be digging into The Unfortunate Traveller. His acidic style also prefigures Swift.

Pimber’s voice gets us closer to Omensetter before we get to Rev. Furber and his personal apocalypse.

Kleist is a strong character, very reminiscent of Bernhard’s Prince in Gargoyles. The development of Marcel through the narrator’s reflections is interesting as well.

Third time reading this one, and there is a dangerous edge to the book. West does not glory in the rot that can exist in societies and relationships, but he does reveal it. ML is far more explicitly a Christ-type than I had realized, and there is a sense that he cannot heal this world despite the queries to his column. Shrike is so clearly a forerunner of Judge Holden.

A comparison between the repetition in house music and the prosody of Haber’s narrator and by extension Bernhard’s monologists is hilarious.

Bernhard, coffee, Montaigne

The book is famous for its pathos, but RPW was a poet as much as a novelist, and his grasp of imagery is astonishing. This is one of the few novels that fuse colloquial dialogue with poetic prose the way that Zora Neale Hurston did.

The glimmers of resistance and humanity amid the horror of 1938 cut through the narrative with real power and heart.

These are incredibly horrifying in a visceral and powerful way.