Super-sonic Duck

lincoln in the bardo - george saunders - it is so so so rare to come across a book that leaves me feeling stunned because i had never imagined a book like that could be written, BUT THIS ONE DID IT. calling it ‘original’ would be damning with faint praise, it was surreal it was incredible, i still feel concussed by the impact and i cannot fathom the mind that came up with a work like this. you know when the concept of ‘imagination’ gets illustrated as someone with the top of their head missing and a load of zany colourful stuff springing out all over the place??? that is how i imagine the author of this book. on three separate occasions i also had to stop reading because it was about to make me cry in public, which is surreal in its own right tbh because i really do not cry easily at fiction. the last time it happened was 3+ years ago. i will surely read more by this author. 

earthlings - sayaka murata - i blasted through this in under 24hrs, i loved every weird bleak grim serenely delusional moment, and i also have to say i found it very funny when it became immediately apparent from the literal first page that you had recced me something as merrily fucked up as all my own recs and that you had done so with exactly as little warning of what to expect as i had too. DEFINITELY NOT COMPLAINING!!!!! IT WAS A WILD RIDE FROM START TO FINISH. 

and actually anon based on this book, i have a rec back for you too! it won the international booker prize in 2020, and it is.......

the discomfort of evening - marieke lucas rijneveld - in the rural netherlands, the eldest child of an intensely religious farming family dies in an ice skating accident. matters deteriorate. i read this late last year and it made an extreme & lasting impression on me, but ultimately i chose not to include it in my previous rec post because frankly i still cannot tell whether i liked it or whether i am just irreparably altered by having read it. but this book has a lot in common with ‘earthlings’. i mean it has a LOT in common. it has an absolutely bizarre amount of things in common. 

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF TRAITS THESE TWO NOVELS SHARE: the narrator is a very young and socially isolated girl with a desperately grim home life, neglectful and/or abusive; she retreats ever deeper into her obsessive, delusional inner world as a way to cope with ongoing trauma; the bizarre behaviour caused by her increasing disconnect from reality goes unnoticed until it’s too severe to be overlooked, after which it’s ignored or mocked or vilified, all of which worsens her alienation which worsens her behaviour which worsens her alienation and so on and on forever; sexual abuse of/by children too young to properly understand what’s happening to them; incest between children too young to properly understand what they’re doing; wildly extreme & graphic violence committed by/against children but which the narrator is too dissociated to feel anything about; really vivid and specific and revolting focus on all things luridly taboo and scatological; the narrator has total faith that if/when she finally gets to one specific location then all of her problems will gloriously disappear....... I COULD GO ON!!!!! BUT YOU PROBABLY GET MY POINT.  

and one more tangent since i’m already on the topic: even though the subject matter is so freakishly similar, there’s a very dark sense of humour to ‘earthlings’ which makes it hit way different imo; when it’s surreal, it’s so surreal that it goes all the way over the top into giddily cartoonish horror. but ‘discomfort’ is wildly surreal in the narrator’s unstable POV while also being committed to unrelentingly bleak realism in the actual events of the novel, and while usually i am ALL ABOUT unrelentingly bleak realism, in this case it really fucked with me. i found this book genuinely deeply distressing in a way i can’t remember any other fiction ever affecting me in my entire life. 

edith’s diary - patricia highsmith - a woman’s family falls apart and her life falls apart and she falls apart too. truly just bleak as hell, absolutely horrible, i loved every moment. this novel is a deviation from type for patricia highsmith in that it does NOT involve young men engaging in murder, manipulation, and sociopathic mind games while travelling continental europe, but i am a devoted fan of all the rest of her novels too.

out - natsuo kirino - four women of assorted circumstances work part-time on a factory floor’s processing line. one of them murders her husband. the others help cover it up, but not all of them want to. everything goes to hell and the plot zigzags ten million times on the way. if what you want is grim psychological suspense feat. complex & merciless entanglements between variously unlikeable women, WHICH IS ALWAYS WHAT I WANT, then this is your book. really extreme grimy realism for the setting of modern-day urban japan, too.

(back-up rec for everything else by natsuo kirino as well, ‘grotesque’ stars two of the most breathtakingly vile & vicious & resentful female characters i’ve ever had the joy of encountering in my entire life. a third woman who they both knew has recently been murdered, and they take it in turns to recount the backstories of their absolutely unhinged lifelong mutual obsessions with her.)

in the miso soup - ryu murakami - a young guy in tokyo gives guided tours of the kabukicho red light district for english-speaking foreigners. one weekend, he’s hired by an american guy. things get creepy and then they get batshit and then they get worse. the violence is so graphic i nearly threw up. frankly i still don’t know if i’m recommending this book but it was a reading experience like no other and it did get me to read every other book by the author, all of which i loathed so passionately that i’ve become permanently obsessed. a complex relationship exists between me and mr murakami.

beyond black - hilary mantel - a professional psychic medium and her immensely spiteful assistant travel the ringroads of suburban britain together, while spiralling ever deeper into the ruinously toxic depths of their mutually destructive relationship. very grim, very funny, very much tailored to my interests in terms of bleak suburbia and relentless interpersonal cruelty between women.

vita nostra - marina & sergey dyachenko - a teenage girl is chosen to attend a secret russian university which will develop her unknown powers..... but she doesn’t want to go, so the cruel & bizarre coercion begins and it does not stop. i've never read anything like this book in my entire life, it’s beyond surreal and i loved it. there’s literally no way to describe it. there’s nothing else like it!!!! reading it feels like your mind is melting and being remade, which incidentally is the experience of the protagonist as well.

the sea, the sea - iris murdoch - a much-celebrated theatre director with an ego the size of the universe retires to the seaside, where he unexpectedly meets his childhood sweetheart, now elderly and happily married. obviously the fact she is happily married will not stop him from reclaiming their young love. the fact she doesn’t want to reclaim it will not stop him either. he knows best. he’ll persuade her. the levels of obsession and self-obsession are off the charts. one of my favourite unreliable narrators of all time.

-

baru remains my dream woman, i remain in love, i will remain loyal to her forever. that whole long slow claustrophobic opening with just baru and apparitor alone together in the keep, post-tain hu, where he is so horrified & sickened & traumatised by her actions that he remains drunk 24/7 to numb himself to the horror of baru while occasionally just bursting out in drunken revulsion to tell her what a cruel vicious sociopath she is while baru is unable to deny it and also unable to express her own horror or grief, and instead has to constantly perform that exact utter vicious callousness hes accusing her of: i was on fire. i truly cannot overemphasise enough just how on fire i was, once again i felt like this entire novel had been written to cater specifically & exclusively to me. i would eagerly welcome the opportunity to be chained to a rock and drowned alive for baru so long as i knew it would benefit her in some way. 

AND EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!!! LITERALLY EVERYTHING, i cant even try to list what i loved because its literally just everything. the whiplash from her extremely repressed sexuality on fear of death in the first book to her flying out of the closet in a miserable depressed oversexed fury in the second and trying to fuck every other woman she met was amazing, i wasnt expecting it at all & i loved it. even setting my pre-existing baru passions aside, it just really made me happy to read a book from the POV of a lesbian narrator who was so very very focused on eyeing other women up with explicitly sexual interest. 

(it has also been long enough that TO MY SHAME ive forgotten her name, but holy fucking shit that snippy spiteful officer from the masquerade navy who baru &co. ended up keeping chained in the hold!!!!! i have never been into anything in my life like i was into the vicious bullying ‘taking my own feelings of helplessness & powerlessness out on a woman who is literally my own chained captive at my mercy & yet still does not respect me’ abuse of authority mess that was her/baru AND THEN IT HAPPENED, THEY REALLY FUCKED, MY DREAMS CAME TRUE, yet again baru managed to involve herself in one of the most phenomenally fucked up f/f dynamics i have ever seen in fiction. i love you, baru cormorant.)