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Pretty rough

House of the Sleeping Beauties reads like a Japanese creepy old man Dostoevsky.

If it were to be exposed by some meddling children that Yoko Tawada was nothing more than Cesar Aira in a language-shifting costume, this reviewer would not be surprised.

Visceral.

Traditional Japanese x Truman Capote vibes

The Little Kingdom...
I have no clue what happened there at the end 😐

'The Land of Sad Oranges' is a moving account of dispossession of a family from Acre, Palestine preceding the Nakba in 1948. Told from the perspective of a child slowly increasingly understanding the tragedy, the short story's light tone belies it's crippling sadness. Kanafani sketches a beautifully simple family and the loss of innocence as they become refugees. One of the greatest short stories I've read.

Denis starts this one out a bit muddy. By 1965, however, the waters begin to clear.

Sweet, sweet, prose.

Flying through this book. It is horrible and painful and feels like watching a car crash in slow motion and I'm afraid this is what half of the population experiences every. single. waking. moment.

Back half of the book is a thrill-ride. I really enjoyed the musicality of Eugenides's writing, but dislike the forced mythic conclusion to the book that falls into the trope the narrator dismissed the journalist for. I am sad the conclusion was as oblique as it was, but I also believe it to be the most fitting. Excellent narrative of the suburban, post baby-boomer experience.

Fast. Jeff E. is a great observer of the suburban American experience. His characters are written in a way that reflects what they value (parked next to an elm stump, no sap). He also uses a trick of assaulting the readers senses with a blistering amount of stuff, which i think is why it reads quickly and intoxicatingly.

I'm not sure what to make of the first chapter, whether it's engrossing because it's genuinely fantastic, or if it's the trap of a grotesque horror playing out with a casual plainness of speech. Either way, I'm hooked.