#litblr

Title: Demon Copperhead / On m'appelle Demon Copperhead Author: Barbara Kingsolver Translator: Martine Aubert

In which a boy faces a great harsh world in rural United States, complete with poverty, drug problems, and football. In which I never realize it's a David Copperfield rewrite until long after I'm finished because I've never read David Copperfield.

I'm writing my reviews with a serious delay, but I did actually take some months to get through this book. Aaaaand I loved it!!!!!! As much as I struggled (I've been struggling with reading since last year), I really did enjoy this read immensely. I rarely get translations of English-written works for all the reasons you might imagine, but the occasional French translation will make it into my TBR here and there. In this case, it was a Christmas gift, from a blind package at my parents' local store. I may be stating the obvious, but booksellers have such good taste always.

This translation slaps absolute ass, by the way. I'm trained in this field (I'm shit at it since I don't maintain the skill, but you know), so by observation or hallucination I will often feel jarred by translations that "sound like translations" to me. It's probably mostly me projecting, but it's a recurring problem that puts a damper on my reading. In this case, I rarely felt it, AND, it's a highly American work. As in, it's obviously turbo-specific to the places it takes place in. So by all means it SHOULD have felt wonky... and it didn't. So I will happily call Martine Aubert's work a fucking masterclass

Demon is the highlight of his own book. His voice is so distinctive, and his humanity depicted in such real, subtle and tender strokes. He's so traumatized (obviously), but I thought it never came off as voyeuristic or as setup for tearjerking sequences. In fact, it's so often more of a shadow layer over the text than actual text... like when he gets called into Coach's office, and it's clear to the reader that Coach is trying to reassure him, meanwhile Demon is clearly reading the situation as an ultimatum and a set of conditions for his remaining at Coach's house-- and it's never actually neatly solved after that. He keeps going with that assumption, which slowly seems to dissolve, but we as readers never get a moment of Demon being told what's what... How do I say it. It's not a hurt/comfort setup (dont get me wrong i love that shit but that's not the point), it's moreso just part of painting Demon as a person. This is what goes on in his head. Made me feel like the book genuinely was more about Demon and the people around him than it was about A Story with Structure, etc, etc.

If that makes sense. Basically I think that if you engage sincerely with this work it's difficult to see Demon as "just a character" because he quickly feels like someone you could actually meet in real life. He is a character and the book is structured and plotted and everything, but there's something masterful in how the characters and Demon in particular are humanized and made to feel real by the text. That's how I felt, anyway.

I got really attached, basically.

Maybe if you remember, about a year before, I watched "Holy Cow", which is a fun-ish coming of age movie about rural youths in eastern France. I often think of these two works next to each other. Rural people are my people, and also distinctly the people I left behind and maybe never fully reconnect with. These stories of hardship and substance abuse tend to float for a long time in my mind. I don't really have anything else to say about it -- but they stay with me.

Daisy and Mushroom is a multimedia literary archive about an intimate relationship that resisted definition—and what happens when one person returns to its remains after it ends. Through poetry, photographs, journal fragments, found objects, digital ephemera, and retrospective prose, the project places the immediacy of the historical record alongside the unreliability of memory and asks what an archive can preserve that a person cannot.

At its center are questions of love, friendship, queer intimacy, memory, grief, geography, language, and interpretation.

The project also asks what remains of the self outside the relationship. Ireland emerges not merely as the setting of Daisy and Mushroom's shared history, but as a place each loves independently: a landscape of art, education, friendship, queer life, politics, language, and return. Their geographies overlap, separate, and continue.

Most of all, Daisy and Mushroom interrogates the distinction between remembering and returning. It does not attempt to determine definitively what Daisy and Mushroom “really were,” nor to resurrect what ended. Instead, it asks what remains after two people become strangers, what an archive can and cannot recover, and whether making art from the remains can become a way of discovering everything that survived beyond them.



hallo here's a few things about me!

favorite genres: lit fic, mystery, classics, thriller, gothic fiction, post-colonial/modern

current top books: the empusium (olga tokarczuk), project hail mary (andy weir), the secret history (donna tartt), macbeth (shakespeare), klara and the sun (kazuo ishiguro), the inferno (dante alighieri), frankenstein (mary shelley), the odyssey (homer), the hunger games trilogy (suzanne collins), the home and the world (rabindranath tagore),

storygraph, art, thoughts