Evan’s Reviews > Miss MacIntosh, My Darling > Status Update

"Dead souls like the autumn leaves stirring where I walked." ... "...the world of dreams which would kill the dreamer and leave only the dream." Let's try this AGAIN. I made it to page 212 last time. I feel emboldened now. I know this is one of the greatest of novels. I love how it's written, but it is exhausting. Can I do this this year? Going for it!

"She dreamed that she was a sundial in a ruined garden, the shadows covering her face so that there were no hours."
Nice.

Whew. Getting to 100 pages of this dense beast is like reading all of War and Peace. And I'm barely anywhere. But I really want to do it. I love this insane writing.

Whew. Getting to 100 pages of this dense beast is like reading all of War and Peace. And I'm barely anywhere. But I really want to to it. I love this insane writing.

she has Etruscan and encrusted in the same sentence. her alliterative skills are off the chart.

Fans of Swinburne, I think, could vibe to this book, though this is wholly Marguerite Young''s vision. I fear that the contemporary mind in the age of Twitter would have trouble with this dense, super-concentrated poetic effusion. So far, it's the greatest novel I've ever read. But it ain't easy.

The perpetually jilted suitor, Mr. Spitzer, replacing the opium mom's multiple dead canaries so she thinks it's the same one who never dies. It's dark, it's funny, it's poignant, it's weird, and it's pretty cool.

You have to let yourself go, and go with the flow with this one. It's a multi-layered dream world. The dense verbiage is difficult, but I understand the book far more now than I did just five years ago after my second -- failed -- attempt to read it. Really lovely, and kind of disturbing in how it captures the indelible and the frail.

A minimalist novel written in super-concentrated maximalist prose. I have to make it through this, because the book is extraordinary and the most popular reviews for it on Goodreads should not be the shitty pans that are here.