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Une petite fille rentre de la plage, au crépuscule, avec sa mère. Elle pleure pour rien, parce qu'elle aurait voulu continuer de jouer.
Elle s'éloigne. Elle a déjà tourné le coin de la rue, et nos vies ne sont-elles pas aussi rapides à se dissiper dans le soir que ce chagrin d’enfant?

What a trip. The best books don’t need to tell you what they’re doing in order to do it brilliantly, and this for the most part is a great example of that. Borgesian, bright and zippy, a shaft of bright sunlight in the dank cell of history. Wow.

What happened when Cortez and his crew of desperadoes made it into the heart of Moctezuma's empire? Álvaro Enrigue's novel poses that question - and answers it a a way that combines a surprising looseness of style with exacting descriptions. Off to a great start and looking forward to more of this Mexican magical mystery tour.

What she went through is quite unbelievable but this is very much the opposite of a misery memoir.

I am getting strong Roadside Picnick vibes from the section where Jonathan goes into thy house and comes back out and can’t remember Ebba’s name….

Always funny, always wrenching, always entertaining. So much to enjoy here.

A detective with amnesia goes in search of his own past in a Paris of fogs and mists and mysteries, empty restaurants and darkened streets...

Where is this going? How do the strands - ranging from Russian spies in China, nuclear fusion, international shipping, Stavanger in all its disparateness, Paris '68, a love triangle between the more outgoing Jonathan, Edda, the physicist's pugilistic daughter & the tall, introverted Ingmar, & all that - fit together? This book is a loooong and open-ended wallow; pleasurable but with no clear goal - at least so far.

This book is a fascinating read & best when Eribon is relating his own experience in his working class family and his perilous path through the French education system. There are more theoretical passages on political and sociological topics that are denser and - for this second language reader - more difficult to understand, but even here he manages to expose by his own success the near impossiblity of "making it".

Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux in its frank, often devastating reflections on working-class lives in provincial France, but in Eribon's case the view is more forensically academic. His self-analysis is pitiless: his discomfort with his roots in the classe ouvrière, his hypocritical idealisation of a revolutionary working class while rejecting his own family; but also his fulsome criticism of other academics.

My daughter is called Miranda. She was born in July. I'm biased.

An interesting mediation on origins, self-determination and social framing. How do we become who we are? What do we give up in order to do that, and how does that affect ourselves and those we leave behind?
Eribon's style has a ponderous and circumlocutory aspect but that's alright by me. It's not like everyone has to write like Hemingway.

The passage where Blom pursues a mysterious Chinese agent across Mongolia and Siberia to a final confrontation in a Moscow suburb was superb.

I usually read multiple books in parallel, and sometimes there are weird alignments that see the action in one book jumping the page and landing in another. Last night I travelled from a boxing gym in Stavanger, Sweden (Under the Paving Stones, the Beach), to a juvenile correctional facility where a rigged boxing match was being staged (The Nickel Boys). Sppoky action at a distance.