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A very long Reading Wednesday post
Nov. 6th, 2019 08:02 amFinished a few more chapters of Nicholas Nickleby— Kate has been rescued, Nicholas has been employed with people who seem almost too nice to be in a Dickens novel, and the Nicklebys have said good riddance to bad uncles, but seeing as I still have half the book to go, I suspect we haven’t heard the last of Ralph Nickleby or Sir Mulberry.
Spent Saturday reading There There by Tommy Orange, which reminded me a lot of Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, in that it’s also told through a series of vignettes narrated by different characters with individual but interconnected stories. It felt both more scattered and more cohesive than The Other Americans, because on one hand, while Lalami’s story sort of spider-webbed out from one, defining event - a hit-and-run death - that impacted all of the POV characters in some way, Orange’s novel moved towards the intersection of all of his characters’ lives at a Native American cultural event in Oakland, California, so the individual characters felt more disconnected/the connections between them were initially less clear. There were also more characters to keep track of, and their individual chapters were written in first, third, even second person POV and jumped around in time. On the other hand, in Lalami’s novel, her characters came from all different backgrounds, and it kind of felt like she was just trying to touch upon every issue she possibly could, from prescription pill addiction to PTSD to racism to infidelity to being undocumented to having a strained relationship with your mother. In There There, all of the characters are Native American, and a few distinct themes emerge even as their experiences differ.
Unfortunately, like The Other Americans, There There ultimately fell kind of flat for me. The most compelling parts were the essay Orange wrote as a preface and the omniscently-narrated interlude between the introduction of all the characters and the powwow they all planned to attend; I found myself interested in some of the characters and their individual stories*, but overall, I felt like we got too little time with each character to really be invested in any of them and it was distracting to have to keep flipping back to the character list at the beginning, like, who is this person, again? The ending also took an unexpectedly sharp turn for the deeply upsetting, when ( major spoilers )
Also read Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel by Russian author Andrey Platonov, written in the 1930s but not published until 1991. The titular Moscow is not— well, it is the city, kind of, but it also refers to the novel’s main(ish) character, Moscow Chestnova - “a bold and glamorous girl, a beautiful parachutist who grew up with the Revolution,” according to the blurb on the back - who we get to know mostly through the series of men that fall in love with her— a geometrician who writes in Esperanto to penpals around the world, extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union; a doctor searching for the secret of immortality; a lapsed reservist who never finishes anything; an engineer who decides, one day, that he’d like to be someone else. This engineer replaces Moscow as the main character halfway through the story, and according to Platonov’s notes, the plan for the rest of the novel was for him to continue to try on different lives, “perhaps … eventually turn[ing] into the type, the character of Moscow herself and tak[ing] possession of her soul for free, without the efforts Moscow expended on her great education.”
This was all a metaphor for... something; probably the Soviet Union. I didn’t totally understand it, even with reference to the copious footnotes, but I liked reading it.
The edition of Happy Moscow I got from the library included a couple of short stories/essays and part of an unfinished screenplay, which I didn’t end up reading, because a. I finally (!!) got my turn for The Odyssey on Libby, and b. I just........ didn’t want to? I finished the story I’d set out to read in the first place.
Spent Saturday reading There There by Tommy Orange, which reminded me a lot of Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, in that it’s also told through a series of vignettes narrated by different characters with individual but interconnected stories. It felt both more scattered and more cohesive than The Other Americans, because on one hand, while Lalami’s story sort of spider-webbed out from one, defining event - a hit-and-run death - that impacted all of the POV characters in some way, Orange’s novel moved towards the intersection of all of his characters’ lives at a Native American cultural event in Oakland, California, so the individual characters felt more disconnected/the connections between them were initially less clear. There were also more characters to keep track of, and their individual chapters were written in first, third, even second person POV and jumped around in time. On the other hand, in Lalami’s novel, her characters came from all different backgrounds, and it kind of felt like she was just trying to touch upon every issue she possibly could, from prescription pill addiction to PTSD to racism to infidelity to being undocumented to having a strained relationship with your mother. In There There, all of the characters are Native American, and a few distinct themes emerge even as their experiences differ.
Unfortunately, like The Other Americans, There There ultimately fell kind of flat for me. The most compelling parts were the essay Orange wrote as a preface and the omniscently-narrated interlude between the introduction of all the characters and the powwow they all planned to attend; I found myself interested in some of the characters and their individual stories*, but overall, I felt like we got too little time with each character to really be invested in any of them and it was distracting to have to keep flipping back to the character list at the beginning, like, who is this person, again? The ending also took an unexpectedly sharp turn for the deeply upsetting, when ( major spoilers )
Also read Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel by Russian author Andrey Platonov, written in the 1930s but not published until 1991. The titular Moscow is not— well, it is the city, kind of, but it also refers to the novel’s main(ish) character, Moscow Chestnova - “a bold and glamorous girl, a beautiful parachutist who grew up with the Revolution,” according to the blurb on the back - who we get to know mostly through the series of men that fall in love with her— a geometrician who writes in Esperanto to penpals around the world, extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union; a doctor searching for the secret of immortality; a lapsed reservist who never finishes anything; an engineer who decides, one day, that he’d like to be someone else. This engineer replaces Moscow as the main character halfway through the story, and according to Platonov’s notes, the plan for the rest of the novel was for him to continue to try on different lives, “perhaps … eventually turn[ing] into the type, the character of Moscow herself and tak[ing] possession of her soul for free, without the efforts Moscow expended on her great education.”
This was all a metaphor for... something; probably the Soviet Union. I didn’t totally understand it, even with reference to the copious footnotes, but I liked reading it.
The edition of Happy Moscow I got from the library included a couple of short stories/essays and part of an unfinished screenplay, which I didn’t end up reading, because a. I finally (!!) got my turn for The Odyssey on Libby, and b. I just........ didn’t want to? I finished the story I’d set out to read in the first place.
