Wednesday, July 20, 2011

174517

I read a lot on vacation, but was for the most part disappointed. The best (non-poetry) book I finished was surely Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. I’ve read many holocaust books so there wasn’t anything particularly mind-blowing in there, but I do appreciate his story, and his ideas on “the drowned and the saved,” which is also in his book of that name, which I read years ago. “Survival” is more personal, but also somewhat coolly observed.

Fiction was more disappointing. Crime and Punishment, I hate to say, was not my bag. I did like the structure – Dostoevsky was good at punctuating the narrative with episodes and creating interesting characters. Still, talk about pages and pages of repetitive inner turmoil. If it wasn’t Rodya, it was the insufferable Katerina Ivanovna (whose turmoil was more external and just as tedious). I thought it might be better to read a book about C&P, say a Freudian interpretation, rather than the novel itself. Apologies to the Russian lovers, whom I count myself among.

I was also disappointed by The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and Wide Sargasso Sea! Then the long-awaited The Sheltering Sky, which pushed my feminist button so hard it hasn’t popped back out yet. Around that point my daughter got tired of asking me how was the book I was reading. And to think that last year around this time I was swooning over David Copperfield and Cloud Atlas.

I’m now reading Then We Came to the End, an entertaining pop culture novel. Still, at page 150 I’m wondering how a full 400 pages of office politics and intrigue is going to be sustained without any true anchor in the plot.

So that’s all on my reading downer. I do hope things improve, whether via better books or a better mood, which indeed could be the true source of my discontent.

6 comments:

Kathleen said...

The anchor comes...

Trish said...

Pages and pages of inner turmoil...I'm a little afraid our chosen book for NYRB will be like that, but it seems you may have that bent. That's okay. You can look at the scarred and ugly and still reach out your hand...By the way, have you had a chance to look at Fatelessness by Imre Kertész? It is a Holocaust book.

Anonymous said...

Another excellent read abput the Holocaust is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. I read it twice.
johanna

SarahJane said...

Hi Kathleen - it has come, but it isn't the heaviest anchor.... Still the book is enjoyable.

Trish and Johanna - thanks for those recs! I have considered that Frankl book before.

Martha Silano said...

Oh, gosh, it sounds like you were dragged down the wrong rabbit hole on your vacation. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment immensely, but maybe because I was 19. I also love/taught Alexie's Lone Ranger--students really dig it! (Have you tried his YA fiction one, the Absolutely True Diary?? I read that one aloud to my son last summer and enjoyed its humor and pathos). I think I read two pages of Wide Sargasso Sea; nuff said. Glad Levi worked out for you--doesn't sound like beach reading, but then again maybe you were not at the beach.

Dave said...

Prose is just overrated. When I go on vacation, I take big fat volumes of Collected Poems by authors i know I love.

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