Recent reading
Jan. 3rd, 2023 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead The Latinist by Mark Prins, and move over, hedonistic undergrads with niche majors committing murder, this is the real dark academia: a doctoral student discovers that her dissertation supervisor has written her an unfairly terrible letter of recommendation in an effort to keep her from leaving for a job at another university, because he's obsessed with her. The novel is split between the POV of the student, Tessa, and her supervisor/stalker, Chris, which makes for an interesting combination— Chris' early chapters are especially chilling, since he's so convinced he's in the right and his actions are even more invasive than Tessa knows.
There is, ultimately, an attempted murder, because Tessa publicly calling out her supervisor at a conference where he "scooped" her major discovery about an obscure Roman poet but got his facts wrong, and then becoming a superstar in her field when everyone realizes she was right, wasn't dramatic enough, I guess— Tessa bashes Chris with a paperweight of Bernini's Daphne and Apollo when she finds out he's been hacking into her email. She gets away with it ("I just found him like this, he must have tripped and fallen :/") and in fact is promoted to his job since he now has severe brain trauma.
The promotional blurb for The Latinist describes it as a "contemporary reimagining of the Daphne and Apollo myth" and like— I guess?? The underlying thread of a powerful man's pursuit of a young woman who doesn't want his advances is there, but that's just, like, second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse. I suppose the ending could be seen as a role-reversed version of Daphne's transformation in the myth, although this didn't occur to me until now. This novel certainly engages with the Daphne and Apollo myth, and draws parallels between Chris and Tessa— not least in the Chekov's gun of the paperweight, which she'd gifted him before the events of the book and before she knew of his obsession with her— so maybe I'm off-base in my understanding that "reimagining" = "retelling"...?
Finished The Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright that I started almost a year ago— it's been my main reading over winter break, and I AM FINALLY DONE. My overall takeaway from this book? Frank Lloyd Wright was The Worst, his approach to architecture was such a hot mess that it loops back around to being impressive that his buildings are still standing, and the Taliesin Fellowship was definitely a cult. (It was actually Olgivanna Wright who seems to have had a knack for being a cult leader; the last several chapters— about the Fellowship after Wright's death in 1959, as it carried on under his widow's control for another twenty years— were especially grim.) The most entertaining bit was the construction of the Guggenheim museum; Wright finally met a client as stubborn and bonkers as himself in artist, curator, and Theosophist Hilla von Rebay, who apparently proposed commissioning Wright after his book literally fell off a shelf and hit her head. The bleakest chapter was about the high rate of tragedy among the few children who grew up in the Taliesin community. This doesn't begin to cover the wild, car-crash-you-can't-look-away-from-ness of the rest of the narrative that falls between those two emotional points.
There is, ultimately, an attempted murder, because Tessa publicly calling out her supervisor at a conference where he "scooped" her major discovery about an obscure Roman poet but got his facts wrong, and then becoming a superstar in her field when everyone realizes she was right, wasn't dramatic enough, I guess— Tessa bashes Chris with a paperweight of Bernini's Daphne and Apollo when she finds out he's been hacking into her email. She gets away with it ("I just found him like this, he must have tripped and fallen :/") and in fact is promoted to his job since he now has severe brain trauma.
The promotional blurb for The Latinist describes it as a "contemporary reimagining of the Daphne and Apollo myth" and like— I guess?? The underlying thread of a powerful man's pursuit of a young woman who doesn't want his advances is there, but that's just, like, second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse. I suppose the ending could be seen as a role-reversed version of Daphne's transformation in the myth, although this didn't occur to me until now. This novel certainly engages with the Daphne and Apollo myth, and draws parallels between Chris and Tessa— not least in the Chekov's gun of the paperweight, which she'd gifted him before the events of the book and before she knew of his obsession with her— so maybe I'm off-base in my understanding that "reimagining" = "retelling"...?
Finished The Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright that I started almost a year ago— it's been my main reading over winter break, and I AM FINALLY DONE. My overall takeaway from this book? Frank Lloyd Wright was The Worst, his approach to architecture was such a hot mess that it loops back around to being impressive that his buildings are still standing, and the Taliesin Fellowship was definitely a cult. (It was actually Olgivanna Wright who seems to have had a knack for being a cult leader; the last several chapters— about the Fellowship after Wright's death in 1959, as it carried on under his widow's control for another twenty years— were especially grim.) The most entertaining bit was the construction of the Guggenheim museum; Wright finally met a client as stubborn and bonkers as himself in artist, curator, and Theosophist Hilla von Rebay, who apparently proposed commissioning Wright after his book literally fell off a shelf and hit her head. The bleakest chapter was about the high rate of tragedy among the few children who grew up in the Taliesin community. This doesn't begin to cover the wild, car-crash-you-can't-look-away-from-ness of the rest of the narrative that falls between those two emotional points.
