Dante In The Underworld

So I decided to (re)read every book on my bookshelf and post/scream about it here.

On an unrelated note, I may have finally gone mad.

(I have gone and looked up the show adaptation (watched some clips, listened to some songs) and wow did that not fit the images in my head. and I think I prefer my own.)

I keep coming back to the format.

I've seen a lot of comparisons of this book to Evelyn Hugo, that it's basically just a worse (i.e. less effective) rerun of the same attempt to paint an imperfect fictional celebrity through the lense of biography. And uhhhh allow me to politely disagree. Evelyn Hugo is, no matter the similarities in set-up or general subject matter, a completely different book, doing a completely different thing.

Daisy Jones is not like a written biography, but like the transcript of a documentary. Actually, while reading, I regularly got frustrated by that fact, because in a documentary, there is archival footage or some other relevant visuals cut in between or over the interview segments, it's not just raw telling. But here it was just all intercut interviews all the time and I get why some people didn't like reading that, because it was... well. low-key frustrating.

But this is the book, this is the format, and so I keep coming back to...

I don't really care if any of them lied, or told half-truths, or misremembered, or whitewashed, or misinterpreted otherwise accurate memories. Because no matter what they said, no matter how (in)accurate, it will look the same kind of hazy to the reader. With this format, there is no 100% crystal clear look into the past, no matter how accurate or biased or distorted or incomplete it would be, because the entire book takes place in the present of the interview.

Evelyn Hugo is a book about telling the past like a story. What is being told is segregated (literally, by chapters) from the present circumstances surrounding it. In essence, Evelyn's tellings are flashbacks (flashbacks from a single, subjective perspective, but still flashbacks). Daisy Jones is all telling, all present, all the time. The past is layered beneath the present tense of the interview and the editing process at all times. There is no archival footage, nothing to look at except the fact that these characters are just saying shit, for the entire length of the book. Past events and emotions are being conveyed, yes, but it never drops, it never can drop, into the realm of flashback.

All of it is hazy, all of it is just out of reach, all of it keeps the reader at arm's length and denies them the immersion of a flashback, of a narrated past. But then, since when is immersion the goal of an interview, or indeed a biography or documentary? While Evelyn paints a very vivid, 3D picture of its titular character by condensing her life down into a narrative, Daisy is the one that captures what Evelyn never could: the unknowability, the untouchability of fame. Daisy creates its narrative in a way that denies the reader even the (false) feeling of knowing Daisy Jones & The Six. It shows the enormous, uncrossable gap that exists between any biography or documentary, and the actual person its about, by recreating that gap between itself and the reader.

(if the title is giving you self-help vibes, then... yeah. yeah, the rest of the book isn't that much different.)

oh my god this was so fucking boring.

I don't care! I don't care about Shams, I don't care about Ella, I don't care that that dude died in the end, I just. don't care!

And I think it's because I don't believe this book when it says "love". Like, it throws the word around like it's weightless, and whenever it hits the page it has all the impact of those "Live Laugh Love" decor signs. Utterly meaningless.

Basic research revealed that Rumi's poetry had an impact on Ralph Waldo Emerson, and honestly that makes sense, because this book gave me massive individualist self-help vibes (aka Emerson central), and there is no faster way to annoy me out of liking your book.

The 13th century bits also read too much like a hagiography (basically biographies of saints), unwilling to make the reader share in a feeling, exclusively focused on preaching at you, entirely reliant on an underlying shared faith of reader and text in order to connect the former to the latter. (though faith, in this case, is just the vaguest notion of "love" - again, live laugh love is the best comparison I have as to how empty all of this felt)

Honestly, the most unbelievable aspect of the entire thing is that no one ever interrupted Shams when he recited his paragraph-long rules. No one ever tells him to shut the fuck up, and I find that more unrealistic than having accurate visions or seeing actual ghosts, especially with the book's tendency to use modern speech patterns and turns of phrase (it clearly has no problem breaking the "long time ago" immersion). Someone would have told him to zip it, and if it'd been by decking him.

Also what the fuck happened with Kerra and Kimya and their inquisitiveness. Why the fuck does the book think that Kerra had to abandon Mary when she converted? Am I missing something about the importance of Mother Mary to 13th century Ottoman Christians (probably, though the book was also in no hurry to elaborate on Kerra's feelings on Mary)? Because as far as I remember, Mary is like, plenty important in the Qu'ran. There's an entire sura named after her and all. I get what her conversation with Shams wants to say, but wouldn't it have been more fitting to just point her at Maryam? And Kimya just made me sad. That was one gratuitous non-sequitor of an arc...

(original title: Masumiyet Müzesi, in English: The Museum of Innocence; read in German translation; maybe I just don't like his writing style)

It's always a bit tricky to judge the writing style of someone you only read in translation, but having read one each in German and English, I think I'm safe to say that maybe, just maybe, I don't like Pamuk's way of tedious, drawn-out, boring memoire style of writing. Maybe I just hate this self-important, emotionally stunted narrative voice he uses for every single one of his characters, including his own fictional self. You know? Maybe.

This is the second romance he starts with a girl directly telling the guy (who is 12 years older than her) that she is not interested in him and that he should leave her alone, and then she gives him one (1) mixed signal and the romance is on. if I had a nickel, etc

Honestly, having never actually seen an Italian art film, this book reminded me of one by reputation. An impecabble mediterranean vibe, heavy on the nostalgia, with regular reminders of a background danger (be it the mafia or political unrest), and a lot of focus on family, food and men cheating on their partners with suspiciously young women.

I hate Kemal so much. Get a job, stay away from her! Like, to a point, his unlikability is intentional, I get that. He is, by design, not a good dude. All the theme-ing around virginity and the gender double standard clearly positions Füsun's story as a tragedy. I don't even hate that Kemal doesn't see the error of his ways by the end, because that's not the kind of character he is. I get all that. But the book doesn't see his selfishness and obession for what they are, either, not really. It's in this "but wasn't he kinda right to be obsessed with her, given that she was really hot as a teenager" frame, and I fuckign hate it (literally, the last scene is Kemal and the author looking at a picture of a 16-year old Füsun in a swimsuit, and commenting on her "beauty". hurgh).

Like, at its core, this book is about a rich cunt involving himself in a lower class family's life with the explicit intention of ruining the young daughter's marriage and have her all to himself, over the course of which he neglects his entire social circle, pushes his (ex-)fiancée into social ostracisation, and fucks up his love-of-his-life's life to the point that she attempts to murder-suicide him. And the author wrote himself into the story so that he could tell the reader via a direct fictional proxy that Kemal is actually cool and a great dude, even if personally unlikable.

(read in German translation; I have written and rewritten this for four (?) weeks now, and I am ready to accept that I will never be truly happy with it)

Not everything I have to read for class is annoying - for example, I like this one. There's something about the style, about the use of very colloquial language set against the long and complex grammatical constructions that are the sentences of this book, and the refusal of paragraphs in every chapter but one, when Irimiás is juxtaposed against the masses....

I liked it. It's also a damn good translation (I think, though I have been backed up on this opinion), which will likely make it extra frustrating that I will now ad-hoc translate and paraphrase my favourite lines from this German translation into English myself.

There is a line (Part 1 Chapter 4, I believe?) about Halics that says he wears his rain coat not as protection from the rain (as it's pretty useless for that after all these years), but as a protection from "inner" rain that "falls continuously from his tired heart and washes his unprotected organs", and oh man, that hurt. The picture of rain-worn organs just kinda fucked me up, Idk. It's such a desolate image, such a long and slow and persistent and unstoppable way to destroy something. Futaki also says at some point that Irimiás' promised paradise will make them "slaves of everlasting elan" and like, wooooo boi, does that feed my reading of Irimiás as a symbol for Western capitalism.

The first concrete proof that this book takes place in "our" world is an old Coca Cola ad poster at the pub. Up until that point, the book could have taken place in a post-apocalypse and/or some strange other-world, on a colony on some far-off planet. But Coca Cola, of all things, locates the desolation in (a literary approximation of) our own reality. Capitalism's promises are old and worn, but they're still there, still remembered, and then Irimiás comes in, comes back, and promises them a better life - until he ends up splitting them up, individualising them, and causes them to give up most of their property, and makes them dependent on employment for their basic needs, including shelter.

Do you see my vision? Because I am currently (for no particular reason, of course, certainly not due to certain upcoming elections hahahahahahahahahahaha), very into post-Wende East German history and I am not quite sure how much I'm just projecting that onto this, but like, it fits so well.

(I started this three times because I kept trying to squeeze reading it into the gaps of my stressful schedule, and this just isn't a book to do that with. it's too poetic to read and understand while under stress. so it took me a bit, as I could only read it in tiny vacation pockets (I've been reading these 300 pages for over three months), but damn, was it worth it in the end)

wow, this hurt. i'm in love.

while being known by science and sociology, and having concrete labels to put on ourselves and understand ourselves with is arguably the most fundamental win we've had in our ongoing fight for equal rights... there is something sublime that i miss without ever having known it about queerness before words.

i refuse to put a label on this narrator. for once, we're going to sit with the ineffable nuance. because what would we gain from cramming this trooper, this mother, into a box that would not fit her grief - neither that which he experienced, even less that which he caused.

my stomach churns as genocidal maniacs like the major walk free, self-righteous, unrepentant, and the grief they themselves may have suffered does not erase the baying for blood, the need to... the need... something. something. cf. Jacob Geller's "Fantasies of Nuremberg"

this book makes you sit with the knowledge that murderers are people and that American soil is tilled with blood. it asks "do you blame them" and the answer is yes, but Thomas(ina) makes it back and you are happy. the violence goes in cycles, and around and around and around and around it goes, leaving grooves in the earth big as canyons.

T.'s pain and grief are Irish, his atrocities American, and her escape from it a futile dream of domesticity that is too soaked in blood to ever know pure contentment. and yet I wish them days without end. days in love and wonder, without hunger, but without forgiveness, too.

because the violence will not leave, even after it left. they lay it to rot, till it into the earth and maybe growing love from this soil is the only way to go. but that is not the same as absolution, and when the wind is right you see that the land will always smell of blood and gun-charred grass.

(oh I do love an environmental revenge story)

This book made me look up why the fuck the English language can't agree on what to call this animal. (following research report sourced from Wikipedia, never think I'm a professional)

Turns out, it's mainly because they are very wide-spread over all of the Americas and every colonialist, of various empires, who saw one asked a different Native tribe, with a different Native language, what to call them. Combine that with English's tendency to acquire new vocabulary the mugger's way, and you make it into the Guiness World Records for having over 40 different names in one language.

"Puma", which is the name scientists, Latin America and most of Europe (therefore me) go with, is Quechua in origin. "Cougar" is English, via Portugese, via French, but ultimately comes from the Tupi language. Funnily enough, Gaelic also has a similar-ish name for the thing that seems to be coincidental and have no connection to this pox-ridden ancestry (the Scottish Gaelic word is just a general one for a male cat, I guess?) - though "cú" apparently means dog or smth, so who the fuck knows.

A thing that suprised me was that apparently some people call it "panther"??? Which is a different animal, guys. Panthers are black leopards, I thought we all agreed on that. Why- anyway.

"Mountain lion" is a very US-American name, as it sounds like the usual "just name the thing The Thing" thing, a la Rocky Mountains or "[My] Horse [Died Here] Creek", but turns out: they have no relation to lions, nor do they live (exclusively) in the mountains! So what the fuck.

What was I talking about again? Right, a book.

I have never been to L.A. and yet I am sick to death of it. It shouldn't exist, it is a monument to hubris, and one day the Earth is going to open her maw and swallow it whole, be it by fire or earthquake or tsunami or hurricane. Until then, this book was a... a new look at it. Which came as a bit of a surprise, because L.A. should, by all the exhausting accounts of it, be done with, literarily speaking. I wish we would be done with it, how is there still more to say

The puma should have been allowed to kill more people, but then I guess that would have been a different story, and I liked this as it was. A trippy dream of anthropomorphisation, of human detatchment from nature and the commodification of authentic experiences. Also a tragic tale of having to live in a world beyond comprehension that continuously tries to kill you because your sheer existence in its realm is a mistake to be corrected.

I like the title. In combination with the cover, it suggests a mouth, which is open to emit air or sound, or take in air or food. A puma ready to bite and consume, or make a threatening noise (pumas can't roar). As it turns out, the throat is not open through the mouth, it is open through the skin of the man's neck, bleeding, freshly dead. It's not a preambel to an action, it's its consequence.

The harm has already been done.

(English title: Clothes make the man; read in a sort of desperate rebellion against all the stuff I have to read for uni)

It's so funny to me how, purely by aesthetics, the subgenre-Romance girlies would go feral for this. Dark, tall and brooding guy in giant black coat silently falls for pure young woman in light coloured dresses while he keeps a secret from her? There's a scene where she cries in his arms and he wraps her in his coat which is at this point compared to wings? There is a section of the internet that, removed from all context, would make concerning TikToks about this.

Unfortunately, it's the 19th century, it's a literary approximation of the real world, the main character is the guy, and he's actually an okay dude instead of a war criminal. He's just kind of pathetic with a good fashion sense and horrendous amounts of propriety and social anxiety. Poor dude keeps waiting for the right moment to correct people, and then he keeps making plans to extricate himself and somehow pay back everything he was given, and in the end he was ready to die just to get out of it all with his dignity intact....

He's a people pleaser in the worst way. He does not want to inconvenience people, to the point that his ideal exit from the situation erases any impact he made in the first place. Even the death scenario includes Nettchen just forgetting about him in a few years. His sense of propriety idealizes a world in which nothing, nobody, ever has any impact on anything or -one.

This book is about the terrifying ordeal of being perceived, being perceived wrong, and the sheer, desperate anxiety of being responsible for a - any - lasting change. It's also about expectations and the theatre of class (literally, in the inn scene) and how the theatre is so ingrained into society that breaking its conventions and rules will draw the irrational ire of all classes, regardless of intention, or awareness, or lack of actual harm done.

The book is too afraid to acknowledge its logical conclusion, which is: Smash the class system and its rule book, it's all dumb anyway. And instead it lands on: Stop judging people for failing society's dress code. Which is kind of like revolution. But also really not.

(read in English translation for a, for the most part, quite irritating seminar. which might explain my feelings on it.)

So... it's complicated. On the one hand, I can sort of see the critical acclaim. On the other hand, I was bored, disgusted, and generally didn't feel immersed until, like, the 80% mark (though that last one might be my fault, I did read a decent chunk of this on an active construction site).

I hate Kara ("Black"). Fuck him, I wish he died.

Shekure's perspective was so fucking weird. The way I read her character was that she married very young in order to secure an affluent future for herself with an okay-ish husband by the standards of her society. She got two kids out of it and loves them a lot, and she genuinely enjoys being a mother. However, her husband disappears and her life begins to crumble, and she eventually flees back to her father's house in order to escape the threat of sexual violence and economic hardship. When her much older cousin, who left after making moves on her when she was a child, comes back and enquires after her, she at first panics, but then decides to scope him out and eventually marry him so that she, again, can be sure of her status and her and her children's safety.

The constant male attention she has been getting since childhood has clearly left a deep psychological impact on her, in that she deludes herself into loving both Kara and Hasan, who both also inspire deep fear within her. She is clearly unable to process her emotions properly and infantilizes Kara in a bid to make a life with him seem more bearable, as motherly love is the only form of love she thinks herself capable of. The cognitive dissonance that this relativation of their age gap and shared history, plus her physical attraction to him, causes leads eventually to her breakdown that brings her back into the house of her in-laws, as she yearns for the comparatively easy safety of her first marriage.

The only two women she is in regular contact with are Esther and Hayriye, the latter of which she hates for being a slave and dismisses as a gold digger for regularly getting assaulted by Shekure's father. Esther, on the other hand, could have had the potential of being an actual female confidant, if her one solution to all women's problems wasn't to get them married as fast as possible.

In the end, Shekure, prideful and classist as she might be, never had a chance within the restrictive society she was born into and was doomed to marry her obssessive (would-be) stalker cousin and delude herself into being content with it.

.... now, why did I say her perspective was weird, this sound like quite a well-told, if sort of dark and disturbing, arc. Simple. The constant feeling that the book was fighting me on that interpretation. I feel like I got to this reading through a series of brawls with this book and that is not the way I like to read. Take this as a very charitable, though likely unintended reading of the character and then please give me the grace of never having to think about this book again.

(full disclosure: I expected this to be end-to-end bad)

... which I know is an unfair thing to think. Which, in turn, is why I read it at all. Every book (at least every one that I've spent money on) deserves its chance to earn its space on my shelf. Despite my expectations, I was ready to be positively surprised.

And it...... hm. It's hard? Weirdly? I don't actually know?

I wish it was better. I think. It's so creative and promising, and yet the writing... It could have been good! The premise and the magic system are so full of thematic potential! There is so much that could have been done with this, and yet....

Let me put it this way: The writing itself is shit, but literally everything around it promises so much fun and has such huge potential for themes that I can totally see how this could be a series which strings along a fanbase that's 100% sure that the next installment will finally fullfill their dreams of narrative quality and more/bigger queer representation. You know, BBC Sherlock style.

Speaking of queer rep... Irene is bi, and yet her past with that female catburgler is wrapped up in vague shame and slander, while in the present she is primarily attracted to her male coworkers. That's it for actual representation, but missed potential includes: Vale is close enough to that cop dude that my personal headcanon involves them shagging, Kai also seems interested in Vale despite being definitely signposted as Irene's love interest, and Bradamant would have had overt sexual tension with Irene if she were a man (and the book was just a little more willing to lean into moral greyscales).

Honestly, this book felt like one of those second-rate Fantasy TV shows for teens that run on cabel and that somehow have five seasons despite the fact that no one you know watches it. The premise and world-building are unique and creative, but the execution just isn't strong or capable enough to carry it to a place where it would be actually good without qualification.

I can't believe I'm saying this. But take the creativity and world-building and ambitions of this book... and combine it with the writing style of The Atlas Six. Because I think, in certain, admittedly quite weird, ways... these books want to be each other. And I think that if they were, if we let them try, if they merged together in just the right way... we'd have an actual banger.

(hello fandom, just passing through, please don't eat me)

I originally planned to read The Long Game right after, but honestly I tried and realized that I completely fucking didn't want to.

I think the show and its reception plus now the book might have done it. Shane and Ilya are now like Sabrina Carpenter songs, to me. They're great, awesome even, easily digestible good vibes... I like them (most in video form, because let's not kid ourselves - the show is better and Sabrina's music videos slap), but watching/listening to them - or worse, discourse about them - makes me want to bash my head in with a fence post.

I've reached overplay with a fucking romance story.

And I do acknowledge that that's a huge thing, that something like that can even happen now (getting overexposed to a gay love story because it is just that popular with the mainstream). When I think about that properly, I do feel awed and happy and hopeful.

Most of the time, though, I wish we could move on and talk about literally anything else again.

That being said, I still liked the book. I think. Honestly, I can't really tell, because most of it was just the show, replaying in my head as I read. I don't feel equipped to judge this book on its own merrits... which is probably for the better, anyway, because I did kinda get the vibe that, had I read this without the show's existence, I would've thought it "fine" at best and then forgot about it.

(omg, I hate this book. I hate it I hate it I hate it, couldn't it at least have been interesting)

What a waste of time. What a waste of brain space. What an emotionally manipulative, thematically toxic wasteland of empty prose.

I take this book's messaging and themes as an insult. Like, excuse me? Really? Seriously? It's your friends' job to keep your traumatized ass from hurting himself? But also some people are too broken to be helped anyway and their suicide is inevitable no matter what? (Fuck you.) It's good actually to have your significant other be the one entire lynchpin of your will to live and to have them be your load-bearing emotional support all day every day? (Fuck you.) Because therapy is out of the question, therapy is suspect because it... tries to help you? And actually your doctor isn't doing malpractice when they don't have you committed for severe self-harming behaviour? And anti-depressants, yes, did actually kinda help, but... (hang on, why did he stop taking them?)? (Fuck. You.) Also, friends and family and a lucrative job just happen to you and severe trauma plus a physical disability are no obstacles to becoming filthy rich from literally nothing? In this economy?

Bullshit. Fuck you. Miserable piece of shit, Demon Core of mental health, I wish my principles allowed me to burn this.

I have never been as disappointed with a book as this. And not only disappointed in an "I expected it to be better" kind of way, but also just... in it's existence at all. I'm disappointed in this book for not being... fuck good, if it was at least passable, if it had any redeeming qualities whatsoever, I might not hate it as much, but this??

It's not just that the story is just gratuitously hurtful to read (calling it the "Demon Core of mental health" isn't even joking - it truly feels like exposing yourself to psychological radiation). It's not just that its themes are some of the most irresponsible shit I've ever seen put into the literary world (if any of these descriptors make you want to read the book, this is your sign to talk that impulse through with a therapist).

It's that it's boring. It's that the narration, the prose, the dialogue (which is not distinguishable from the prose for no good stylistic reason because would it surpise you to learn that this book is also not that well written) is walking round-and-around in a witless circle that only ever pretends to be deep. It's a two-dimensional horror-fest of human suffering, irregularly interrupted by architecture porn or lists of school friend names or inane conversations that are exactly as dull as these richer-than-the-gods people's day-to-day might have you expect.

I might just glue my copy shut, see if that gives me catharsis.

(didn't expect lesbians. very happy to find out that there were, indeed, lesbians.)

When I talked to friends about this book, I think I compared reading it a lot to my experience of playing Stardew Valley? Which is to say, I am enjoying myself with something utterly unbingable which I nevertheless have to finish relatively quickly before I get too bored with it.

Cozy things have a tendency to not work on me. At some point I always get bored, which then makes me annoyed with myself because I do enjoy these things, they are nice and harmless and how dare my brain be bored now! And then these effects tend to get amplified the longer I stick with a particular thing, and then at some point I get too bored and stop.

So reading this had a certain element of forcing myself to read it to it. Which on the one hand amplified the annoyance, on the other it was made quite easier by the book I was reading parallel to it (more on that in my next post).

I don't even have complaints or anything, none of this is critique, I just... can't handle cozy. Especially when it isn't offset by something gratuitously grotesque (which is something I enjoy reading even less, so that's not even a solution).

(not prompted by the National Theatre production coming to YouTube for a week, just a very lucky coincidence for me.)

Lady Windermere's Fan: I don't know how or why, but I found the cast of this one adorable. I loved every single one of these idiots. Also, there is something so delightful and giddy about unrevealed secrets. So many soap operas would be so much better if people just got away with a little more harmless secret keeping.

Salome: The kind of dark, twisted, low-key blasphemous decadence that makes me fascinated with Jesus Christ Superstar. I would love to see this live.

A Woman Of No Importance: Honestly, I have trouble remembering this one. It kinda managed to be a slightly worse version of all the others (except Salome) at once? Good title drop, though, especially the inversion at the end.

An Ideal Husband: I didn't quite understand what this one was on about, but the political scandal was a nice change from high society/family drama. It made the intrigue and the subterfuge more interesting, and away from the talks about gender roles (which confused the fuck out of me), there is an interesting view on the world and responsibility and image and morality in here.

(I should have read this right when I bought it. Which, illustrating the entire point of this blog, was five whole years ago.)

I dunno, maybe right back when it came out I could have still vibed with this? There is a subsection of specifically queer YA romance that has a point to make, some kind of wisdom to preach to its teen audience about queerness, and when you're solidly in your twenties and immersed in too much (i.e. any) discourse, that wisdom falls on ears that have heard it 200 times before. You know?

And that doesn't make it bad! I mean, I did find it a bit bland, even outside the obvious life lesson(s), but there are probably bisexual teenagers out there who need to hear some of this, so like. I'm not gonna judge, I just missed my window of being the target audience.

I also found Darcy's inability to read her own love life hilarious, even in scenes that the book probably didn't want me to laugh at. And Brougham's home life came across as a bit cartoonishly shit, like he was living in an episode of trash TV, sort of.

I did like that the book wouldn't let you forget that Ainsley is trans. And never through discrimination! She just... learned to sew so she had clothes that would fit her properly, and at one point had to circle back to their mum's house because she forgot her hormones (most relatable shit ever, ngl.)

I did like "Only Mostly Devestated" better? But I generally tend to like YA books more when I personally relate to the protagonist, and Darcy.... Darcy just kind of annoyed me, a little.