Archive for the ‘Quickies’ Category
Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction
- Book: Stoner by John Williams
John Williams’s Stoner is simply a novel about literature, those who love it, and those who spend most of their lifetime living on its nourishment. William Stoner, whose the book is dedicated to, had spent his childhood and few of his adult years in a most banal of bucolic lifestyles, until unexpected circumstances sought him to the University of Missouri to pursue the academics of agriculture, where he discovered the uncharted love “of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and of the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.” With a deadpan prose and a discreet evasion from sentimentality, Williams unfolds Stoner’s trials and tribulations in many arresting, though despondent, instances: his marriage miserably fails, his daughter’s life is dishearteningly sheltered, and his career as a professor is hindered and ravaged by discomfited conflict. Still, Williams makes sure to distill Stoner’s daily life with enough reciprocated love and beauty to cope with such miseries, whether through the leaves of literary books or occasional friendships and love affairs. What emerges from the novel’s unhurried chapters is a burdened college professor, whose life is dovetailed with a stern observation on humanity, and how absurd, confounding, beautiful, mundane, and poignant it can be. Stoner is both a celebration of life and an elegy of reality, told with an honest overtone, delicate structure, and profound respect to the minimalism of everyday existence.
Quickies: A Confederacy of Dunces – La Moustache
- Book: A Confederacy of Dunes by John Kennedy Toole
“A Confederacy of Dunces” is an unusual novel that follows the exploits of the rotund, indolent Ignatius J. Reilly, who lives with his indomitable mother, Mrs. Reilly, in New Orleans. For years, Ignatius has lived off of his mother and her welfare checks. Then it happened: Mrs. Reilly plowed her car into a building, and to pay for the damages, she demands that the supercilious Ignatius should get a job, several in fact. Before he knows what has happened, Ignatius finds himself at the center of a worker’s revolt and the common share of several ingenious characters. It is here that John Kennedy Toole‘s sense of humor flourishes, which is either side-splittingly funny or merely quaint, usually exhibited by his keen ability to write in various dialects and recreating witty caricatures of popular stereotypes that comprise the individuals that populate this story. Yet, it is Ignatius that proves to be the most fascinating. He lives in his own egocentrically warped world, and he constantly strives, and fails, to force those he meets to confirm to his worldview. Ignatius is not a likable character, but it is hard to ignore him. He is so obnoxious, arrogant, and self-righteous that he becomes a walking farce that it is impossible to take your eyes off of him. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is not your typical novel; what it lacks in plot is more than made up in farcical vignettes, intriguing characters, vivid imagery, and unforgettable dialog. I ardently place it as one of the most important books in Southern literature.
Quickies: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness – A Boy and His Blob – Treeless Mountain
- Book: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates
Eleven anecdotes. Eleven fictitious portraits. “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness”. This is simply the premise of Richard Yates’ second novel after he had published his grandeur debut, “Revolutionary Road”. Akin to its herald, the novel galvanizes the artistry and the domestic realism that eloquently pervade Yates’ sparingly paced chapters, creating a hypnotic voice that rims with sentiment but remains shy of sentimentality. His stories may not be a bundle of laughs but his commentary of the world -and the state of mind it creates- is so economically and so persuasively excruciating to the fact it borders the edge of plausibility. Indeed, Yates’ characters are not scandalized by their actions but rather their struggle to find a sense of life and themselves. The zenith of such anthological descriptions of human fragility is a haunting, subtly shaded mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true and just beginning to ring a little hollow. The latter can be attributed to few of the novel’s depictions but the rest is quenched with sublime characterizations. If you want to brush up on your vintage American literature, then think nowhere else than Yates’ oeuvres.
