Rasma Haidri > Recent Status Updates

In my family we used to say that our father could make a meal out of nothing. Vigdis Hjorth has done the literary equivalent here; made a novel out of seemingly nothing. There’s a meta aspect: “never intended to write about the pub… well look at this” (bad translation from memory). Each time I think I’ve read my last VH novel, as her material tends to revolve around the same theme(s), she surprises me.

Sorry, just have to say that any and every Swede coming to Canada to study would be able to speak English. This error weakens the book’s credibility.

Suddenly on page 107 I find I’m reading about Donald Trump.

“Det er det samme mønsteret hver gang. Han takler ikke nederlag. Han aner rett og slett ikke hvordan han skal håndtere dem.
Han tørner fullstendig.
Det må skyldes en feil at han tapte. Det må skyldes andres feil. Hvordan kunne de unngå å se at han var rett mann?”

?

No, wait! I’m reading Why Cats Paint!

A sweeping war epic, beautifully composed from the sentence level up to the operatic framework. This book was introduced to my book group as "a story about a woman overcoming blah blah..." but it is not that at all, thank god. There are women and men, but in a fundamental way the main characters are 1935's Ethiopia and Italy, or their armies locked in doomed allegiance to the shadow puppets Mussolini and Selassie.

I grew up in this area, pre-internet, pre-opiate crisis and pre-gun bearing free for all… so a strange nostalgia permeates my hearing this tale.

Rereading it. You don’t read the same book twice and it’s only vaguely familiar.

had to take a break and come up for air...

Sometimes I see a man mumbling to himself, through a window. I am outside, in the snow and the man inside mumbling knows it is winter, which is what he muses over, and I stand watching him, listening to the sound and sometime cadence of the words. I catch just a gist of what he is saying, something about winter, and it is not his meaning but his performance that keeps me there, watching.

I am liking these poems more the further into the collection I go.

"...I am trying for calm,/but the fears come in the silent//time, the knocks and groans/ of a house still seething //into the ground, startles me;..."

I like a house seething into the ground, and the vulnerability of the man it frightens.

I dunno. It’s one of those volumes of poetry that makes me wonder if I know anything at all about poetry.

His first poem “How I Became an Apostle” is after Edward Hirsch. I read Hirsch’s poem “I’m Going to Start Living like a Mystic” to see if it shed light on what Kwame is trying to say. Hirsch’s metaphor is cinematic and profound. I don’t get what Kwame is trying to say.

Glad I stuck with it past my initial annoyance with the characters. They grow to be as annoyed with themselves so I feel included.

An impossible reader to listen to, so I cannot judge the prose. Abandoned.

Yawn. Turn pages fast. Yawn. Read wide-eyed. Put book down. Forget where I left off. The small yellow post-it must be wrong, don't recognize anything. Go back a hundred pages. Start over...

A masterpiece of prose. I can add nothing to the lone blurb on the back cover in which a schoolboy says that Alan Moore is "all in all the best writer in human history".

hmm... as I wade into chapter 2 I wonder if I should have read the first two books in the trilogy first...

And we trudge along, never nearing... Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I fall asleep believing this is the worst book ever written. Then I remember God is a Bullet and Reynolds Price and that this is Fitzgerald for crimeny, so it must just be me who shouldn't read good literature at bedtime. Other times I think, nah, this is the dregs of a great talent that was spent on Gatsby. I leave it on the nightstand...

And we trudge along, never nearing... Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I fall asleep believing this is the worst book ever written. Then I remember God is a Bullet and Reynolds Price and that this is Fitzgerald for crimeny, so it must just be me who shouldn't read good literature at bedtime. Other times I think, nah, this is the dregs of a great talent that was spent on Gatsby. I leave it on the nightstand...

And we trudge along, never nearing... Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I fall asleep believing this is the worst book ever written. Then I remember God is a Bullet and Reynolds Price and that this is Fitzgerald for crimeny, so it must just be me who shouldn't read good literature at bedtime. Other times I think, nah, this is the dregs of a great talent that was spent on Gatsby. I leave it on the nightstand...

I lay it aside for a year or so, but that had nothing to do with the book itself, which I loved from its first fantastic millennia-encompassing sentence. Now that I finished Deep by James Nestor it's the perfect time to pick this up again.

Life’s too short to bother finishing this one.

didn’t I finish this yet?

I started reading this intending, finally, to allow Knausgård to bore me. Alas, he can’t.

5 pages in... OMG this book should be required reading for every person on the face of the earth who is even remotely interested in understanding human ontology.