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4thace

4thace@books.theunseen.city

Joined 2 years, 1 month ago

Refugee from Goodreads. I try to review every book I finish. On Mastodon: noc.social/@Zerofactorial

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Michael Cunningham: The Hours (Hardcover, 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 3 stars

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as 'one of our very best writers' …

The celebrated book fell flat for me

3 stars

I picked up this book I had on my shelves five mnoths ago to read on vacation and only now got around to finishing it. It is told as three parallel stories told in stream of consciousness style about three women experiencing trouble following the prompts of their own hearts owing partly to the people in their lives. There are many colors of blue they feel, chronic barriers to communication, secrets they feel obliged to keep, regrets about the way life has gone, and so on. We start out with the famous one, Virginia Woolf, whose story Mrs. Dalloway informs the way we experience the other two, in a prologue at the very end of her life. There are echoes between the stories concerning mental turmoil, of illness, of self-harm, and more. At the end a link between two of the storylines is uncovered which did seem clever.

I never …

reviewed Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis: Swann's Way (Paperback, 2004, Penguin Classics) 4 stars

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences …

A superior translation to the one dating back to the 1920s

5 stars

When I reviewed the English translation of this book by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (books.theunseen.city/user/4thace/review/79935/s/review-of-swanns-way-on-goodreads#anchor-79935) it was 2013, my Year of Reading Proust over at Goodreads. I gave it five stars then, after some hesitation, after I had even more time to think of what these books are trying to bring about in the reader. I originally read that older translation in the 1980s when I was in graduate school and remember that only in a hazy way, especially the long central section focusing on the inner life of Charles Swann. Now after having all the books in the series I know that character is not a central as I assumed before and have enough perspective now to concentrate on the language without being sidetracked by such assumptions. Also, I read the Collected Stories by Lydia Davis (books.theunseen.city/user/4thace/review/79794/s/review-of-the-collected-stories-of-lydia-davis-on-goodreads#anchor-79794), the translator of this newer edition, and was …

Arthur Sze: Sight Lines 4 stars

Work by a poet rooted in both the East and the West

4 stars

Here is another thin volume of this poet's work, which came out just a couple years before the large collection The Glass Constellation and contains the title poem in that work. I like how the poems are described as "braided" with images weaving through one another across line boundaries but remaining distinct. A poem might start out talking about the actions of some character, switch to the description of some saesonal ritual, then talk about a scene from nature, all without transitions or explanations. The reader experiences moments which might be in sequence or simultaneous, harmonious or discordant, which can take up some enormous space in the world. Life can bring experiences of peace and violence.

Last year this poet was honored by the Library of Congress with the Rebekah Johnson Babbitt prize for lifetime achievement. I find his work stimulating and enigmatic at the same time.

Cady Coleman: Sharing Space (2024, Penguin Books, Limited) 3 stars

What it takes to get to space

3 stars

This is a series of stories selected to tell the story of how the author became an astronaut and in the process discovered what her particular gifts were. I originally learned about this through Adam Savage's YouTube channel. It follows a chronological order describing how she became a PhD chemist, joined the Air Force, was accepted into the astronaut program, trained for Space Shuttle missions, worked for NASA in various roles, qualified to live in the International Space Station for a nearly six month stint. All of it was accomplished despite casual and pervasive sexism, a committed long distance family arrangement, and conquering the many physical challenges going along with the job. There are three appendices covering frequently asked questions astronauts need to field. It all seems so orderly a march a goal, studded with perfectly crafted anecdotes along the way which lead to lessons the author wants to share …

reviewed Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire (1989) 4 stars

Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a …

A challenging tangle to listen to

3 stars

This is an example of hypertextual fiction decades before this re-emerged when webpages made linked literary forms easier to implement, where the ostensible subject of the book, the thousand-line poem by the character John Shade ends up being dwarfed by the extravagant and erratic commentary supposedly written by the character Charles Kinbote. The commentary spins out with extended musings on the history of the country Zembla which is dominated by political intrigue to the point of unhinged obsession on the part of Kinbote. By the end, he shows signs of monomania which call into question the sanity of any of what have read, the classic sign of an unreliable narrator. The writing parodies popular melodrama and thrillers, literary criticism, and academic life in its own pompous way, only increasing our doubts.

I had trouble finding this in a regular ebook edition I liked, so I listened to this in the …

Helene Hanff: 84 Charing Cross Road (Paperback, 1992, Warner Books) 4 stars

Bevat in hoofdzaak correspondentie tussen Helene Hanff en Frank Doel Oorspr. uitg.: New York : …

A comforting read

4 stars

I don't remember why I checked this out of the public library over fifty years ago, as a teenager, the first time I read it, but I do recall the comfortable feeling this story gve me then. When I saw it in a used bookstore not long ago I knew it was time for me to pick it up again. I really didn't remember any of the details of this long correspondence between the author and her London counterparts but I did pick up on the contrast between the letters of the brash American and those of the more restrained British forms of expression that give the the book much of its charm. The two main characters shared a love of out of print British literature but more than that they each came to feel a transatlantic love for one another over their twenty years correspondence. The economic hardships of …