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When opening The Book of Anna, a three-page table of contents is followed by a preface titled: “An Explanation of What This Book Is About.” The author, Carmen Boullosa, imparts that The Book of Anna is a book written by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; the famous character mentions working on the novel in the classic tome. Of course, The Book of Anna is written by Boullosa, but it’s all par for the course in this experimental and playful novel that at once is a tribute to the book Anna Karenina, and also means to revise the portrayal of its central female character.
Boullosa’s novel is sectioned into five parts; they feel like disparate sections tenuously threaded together by the flicker of Anna Karenina’s memory or ghostly gossamer. The Book of Anna is at once so many things that it might feel burdensome trying to parse, but Boullosa’s humorous infusion throughout winks at the reader, and makes it light and absolutely enjoyable. I cracked so many smiles while reading...
Read the rest of the review at thebookslut.com <3
Boullosa’s novel is sectioned into five parts; they feel like disparate sections tenuously threaded together by the flicker of Anna Karenina’s memory or ghostly gossamer. The Book of Anna is at once so many things that it might feel burdensome trying to parse, but Boullosa’s humorous infusion throughout winks at the reader, and makes it light and absolutely enjoyable. I cracked so many smiles while reading...
Read the rest of the review at thebookslut.com <3
A notorious witch’s dead body is discovered in a river by a group of boys in a small Mexican town. The tentacle-like arms of Fernanda Melchor’s narrative grow from this opening scene and slither through the lives of the townspeople, revealing the historical, the recent past, and nothing at all. On one level, Hurricane Season is an unraveling of the events prior to the corpse’s discovery and how she came to die; but more than that, Hurricane Season is an odyssey of all that one cannot know, and the truths that lurk unseen among the grim daily lives of the impoverished people in the town of La Matosa. One could categorize this novel a mystery, but the revelations within render the questions of ‘who did it?’ and ‘why?’ banal.
Most of the 13 chapters are long and follow a character connected to the witch. The original witch: her mother. The rumors and mudslides and deaths and curses that created the witch as she was known before her death. Yesenia, who encounters her cousin Luisma one morning with blood all over his hands and face. Brando, a boy that Luisma galivants around town with, drinking, doing drugs and much more detailed sordid activities. Luisma’s stepfather who escaped a hospital after a bad car accident because:
That’s one of the book’s shortest sentences. The novel continues on a relentless trajectory of endless sentences—some last more than thirty pages—and it makes the reader feel out of breath and like you can’t put the book down because there is no natural stop and you really, actually, very much want to put the book down because there is a lot of vile shit that’s happening, oh and everyone’s using words like ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ and perhaps you shouldn’t read this in bed next to a partner who is sleeping sweetly because there was that one moment where you uttered ‘fuck’ and he stirred, and then you knew you had to put the book down for the night, but those weird dreams started coming so you had to turn the light on again, especially toward the end of the book when it all devolves more and the actions that lead to the death of the witch—a character you somehow know less about at the end of the book than the beginning—start making you feel sick, particularly Norma’s chapter, but then it gets even worse in Brando’s, of course a dog is brought into it, and then the grime starts to suffocate you even when you’re not reading it and perhaps this isn’t a healthy book, but my god it’s a thing of beauty.
Read the rest of the review at thebookslut.com <3
Most of the 13 chapters are long and follow a character connected to the witch. The original witch: her mother. The rumors and mudslides and deaths and curses that created the witch as she was known before her death. Yesenia, who encounters her cousin Luisma one morning with blood all over his hands and face. Brando, a boy that Luisma galivants around town with, drinking, doing drugs and much more detailed sordid activities. Luisma’s stepfather who escaped a hospital after a bad car accident because:
“The doctors told him they were going to cut it off, and he said no, no fucking way, he didn’t give a shit if it was bent or missing bits of bone, it was his leg and no one was lopping it off and the doctors said nope, no can do, that leg was as good as gone and, besides, the risk of infection was too high, but Munra dug his heels in and with Chabela’s help he escaped from the hospital the day before they were due to hack it off, and in the end made those quack cunts eat their words because his leg never did get infected and it just wound up a little wedged out of place, right?”
That’s one of the book’s shortest sentences. The novel continues on a relentless trajectory of endless sentences—some last more than thirty pages—and it makes the reader feel out of breath and like you can’t put the book down because there is no natural stop and you really, actually, very much want to put the book down because there is a lot of vile shit that’s happening, oh and everyone’s using words like ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ and perhaps you shouldn’t read this in bed next to a partner who is sleeping sweetly because there was that one moment where you uttered ‘fuck’ and he stirred, and then you knew you had to put the book down for the night, but those weird dreams started coming so you had to turn the light on again, especially toward the end of the book when it all devolves more and the actions that lead to the death of the witch—a character you somehow know less about at the end of the book than the beginning—start making you feel sick, particularly Norma’s chapter, but then it gets even worse in Brando’s, of course a dog is brought into it, and then the grime starts to suffocate you even when you’re not reading it and perhaps this isn’t a healthy book, but my god it’s a thing of beauty.
Read the rest of the review at thebookslut.com <3
I wouldn't know where to start to tell you what this book is about; so I won't. There's a writer here, well a few writers. One in the past, one in the present. Perhaps the one in the past is now a ghost in the present, or can see the present. As the book articulated: "you can remember the future, too." Perhaps there's a tree left on a rooftop and a woman in a red coat on the subway and Roberto Bolano jokes and the writer's husband is asking her questions about her novel or not-novel and his role in it. Or perhaps not.
A delightful listen, a clever meta story that made me laugh out loud once on the subway (and look around for ghosts). I think, though, that it might be a five-star read if I read it in print instead of audiobook, and was able to stop and think a bit more, trace Luiselli's intricate storylines to and fro with more ease. I'll be keeping my eyes out for it in bookstores, because it's a book I must come upon my happenstance. I wouldn't accept anything less.
A delightful listen, a clever meta story that made me laugh out loud once on the subway (and look around for ghosts). I think, though, that it might be a five-star read if I read it in print instead of audiobook, and was able to stop and think a bit more, trace Luiselli's intricate storylines to and fro with more ease. I'll be keeping my eyes out for it in bookstores, because it's a book I must come upon my happenstance. I wouldn't accept anything less.
I am not usually a person that likes to know much about a novel before reading it; I enjoy going in blind, maybe knowing a little word-of-mouth, a thing or two, and just skimming the back cover for keywords. When I'm in a bookstore, I read the first sentence to know if I want to buy it. I even skip introductions in books if they are not part of the fictional story (I read them after I've finished!).
However, upon reading Luiselli's afterword in THE STORY OF MY TEETH, I wish I had known just a little bit about how she crafted this novel at the outset. I mean, it says it right there on the description, I just never read the full description. It's a novel told in parts, and was written in parts, as commissioned by a Mexican juice factory's... art gallery. Luiselli would send her story of a man named Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez Sanchez in chapbooks to the gallery, and would hear the factory workers reading it and discussing it. Then she would send the next part, organically growing her novel with the input from the workers, part by part. There's more to it, and it's all in the great afterword, but upon reaching this understanding, my mouth was definitely agape, and I wanted to listen to it all over again!
The story itself seems a little disorienting and confounding at first--why are we hearing Highway's story? The narration is wonderful and cinematic, and carried me along even though I wasn't quite sure what was going on at times. I surely laughed a lot, and there were moments of sadness. It all becomes clear in one of the later chapters, and this translation from the Spanish also includes a part written solely by the translator, Christina MacSweeney--also completely fascinating why Luiselli wanted the translator to be part of the novel. A collaborative effort for art.
This was certainly up my art+books lovin' alley, though I'm not sure everyone will have as pleasurable an experience as I did.
However, upon reading Luiselli's afterword in THE STORY OF MY TEETH, I wish I had known just a little bit about how she crafted this novel at the outset. I mean, it says it right there on the description, I just never read the full description. It's a novel told in parts, and was written in parts, as commissioned by a Mexican juice factory's... art gallery. Luiselli would send her story of a man named Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez Sanchez in chapbooks to the gallery, and would hear the factory workers reading it and discussing it. Then she would send the next part, organically growing her novel with the input from the workers, part by part. There's more to it, and it's all in the great afterword, but upon reaching this understanding, my mouth was definitely agape, and I wanted to listen to it all over again!
The story itself seems a little disorienting and confounding at first--why are we hearing Highway's story? The narration is wonderful and cinematic, and carried me along even though I wasn't quite sure what was going on at times. I surely laughed a lot, and there were moments of sadness. It all becomes clear in one of the later chapters, and this translation from the Spanish also includes a part written solely by the translator, Christina MacSweeney--also completely fascinating why Luiselli wanted the translator to be part of the novel. A collaborative effort for art.
This was certainly up my art+books lovin' alley, though I'm not sure everyone will have as pleasurable an experience as I did.
The title with tagline is WAIT, BLINK: A PERFECT PICTURE OF INNER LIFE. The omniscient narrator introduces several characters scattered across Scandinavia, mostly women, and traces their inner lives professionally, personally, and pop culturally. I really admire the way Øyehaug crafted the narrative voice; I found it clever and it worked well in audio. At the same time, I think it's a book I would love to reread in print—there were parts I wanted to linger on.
It's also funny. At one point a film director decides she'd like a romantic trajectory similar to Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise. There's a student who falls in love with an author...from a book-jacket photograph; she's been working hard on an article about Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and what it means when a woman wears a man's button-up in movies. That author? Well, he's just bouncing back from a relationship that fell apart because they had an intense argument about Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2. I was trying to figure out why all the references were from the late 90s and early aughts and then realized that though the English translation was published in 2018, the original book was published in 2008.
It's also funny. At one point a film director decides she'd like a romantic trajectory similar to Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise. There's a student who falls in love with an author...from a book-jacket photograph; she's been working hard on an article about Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and what it means when a woman wears a man's button-up in movies. That author? Well, he's just bouncing back from a relationship that fell apart because they had an intense argument about Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2. I was trying to figure out why all the references were from the late 90s and early aughts and then realized that though the English translation was published in 2018, the original book was published in 2008.
It starts off a little rough, but Mindy eventually wins me over by discussing what it was like to have job stability with The Office and then try (and succeed) in running her own show. She's admirable and honest and I loved hearing about her work. She also had a really funny section about trying to make friends and though it doesn't always work, her dry delivery provided some laughs. I might recommend this more to read on a page rather than the audiobook, just become some things come across awkwardly in narration (like a whole chapter of email exchanges).
