Start the month with a hundred year old Austrian satire, end the month with a hundred year old French satire. Why not?

Not that I was really aware this was a satire before the opening page (The Vatican Cellars: An allegorical satire) told me. I ARC’d The Vatican Cellars because I read La Symphonie pastorale in high school, which is a story pretty much perpendicular to this one. I don’t recall La Symphonie pastorale as a romp. The Vatican Cellars is a romp. The satire here is definitely more subtle than in this month’s earlier Austrian satire (i.e. no Martians sweeping in at the end and blowing up the earth). I appreciated that, having the author think me a little bit clever. But I likely missed a lot of the Catholic jokes and I know I missed pretty much all the Freemason ones.

So we have our romp. There’s a whole intermingled family (three sisters, their husbands, an illegitimate child, the childhood friend of the illegitimate child, the girlfriend of the illegitimate child and his childhood friend (generally not at the same time, but maybe?), the sister of one of the husbands, the father of same husband, a childhood friend of another husband (who is in love with the sister his childhood friend married), a bunch of the kids of various sisters and husbands); part way through I felt like I needed one of those family trees found in the front of heavy Russian novels. Then I sorted myself out and continued. The main narrative thrust, at least the one that gets most of the family from France to Italy, is a sort of 419/Nigerian-Prince scam, where you roll your eyes at the characters who can’t seem to see how ridiculous the whole thing is, en courant comme des canards sans tête. There’s the proto-nihilism and a crime that one could attribute, retroactively, to Mersault. There’s a bunch of pious characters ignoring taboos (extra-marital affairs! incest! blasphemy!). There’s a dragging of the last twenty pages or so as some of the machinations are revealed to some of the characters and then …

And then the story simply stops. Bam. Like a wall and we’re in the endnotes and afterword.

Um, okay.

The afterward tries to suggest that the abruptness is again a manner of playing with preconceptions, i.e. where is the happy ending, or the comeuppance or the return to moral rectitude? Nowhere! Because I, André Gide, am trying to fuck with your idea of how stories like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

So the book was funny and engaging and then it started to slog and then it finished. The End.

But I will mention that The Vatican Cellars is not at all like La Symphonie pastorale, which is more what I was expecting because I never read the blurbs on Netgalley maybe as closely as I should have?

See the kind of wacky verb-tenses in that past sentence? There’s a lot of verb-tense changes The Vatican Cellars. I suppose they are from the original text and not the translation, but they pull me out of the story. Also the narrator who likes to talk to the reader now and then, I think to remind us that André Gide is somewhere watching us. Then the translation, which the introduction assures me has been modernized for today’s reader, veers between describing something as looking gross (at least it wasn’t gnarly) then using words like bumf, which is apparently British slang, no idea if that’s contemporary or not. I’m glad my kobo has a dictionary for me to look these words up in. Ending a review like this, without any real sort of conclusion may seem a bit odd, but think of it this way, I am trying to fuck with your idea of how reviews like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

The Vatican Cellars, by André Gide, a new translation by Julian Evans, went on sale August 11, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I am not predisposed towards magazines. They have too many advertisements and those that don’t, like Bitch and Adbusters and The Walrus, I let my subscriptions lapse with a stack of issues I never even got around to starting. I cherry pick my way through The Economist most weeks, half-finishing articles and sections. I’ve never read every article in their China section. I don’t think I’ve read their Obits in ages. So even the magazine I “read”, I don’t really read. Something about magazines and their stories just doesn’t gel with me.

But, break outside your comfort zone and all that. A Best-Of Collection means I won’t have to be wading through the trash, thought I. It’s curated, to use web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now? n.0?) lingo. Such a collection will inspire me to explore more long-form journalism. My horizons will be expanded and I will be all the richer.

Except, well, not really.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the stories in The Best American Magazine Writing 2015. They aren’t riddled with typographical errors or unsubstantiated claims. They aren’t unnecessarily fanciful or overwhelmingly dour. They are perfectly adequate technique pieces. I could imagine journalism students dissecting them in little work groups and giving powerpoint presentations afterwards.

But I can’t say that, with the exception of Brian Phillips’ The Sea of Crises, about Sumo wrestling and Yukio Mishima, that I enjoyed reading any of these articles. That I felt that feeling you get after reading something that knocks your mind into the next level, like an energized electron. Most of the time, I just felt annoyed. Or forgetful. Three times now I’ve looked at the table of contents, baffled by Love and Ruin. Three times I couldn’t remember what that piece was about, including about half an hour after I read it. I think I’ve finally got it down though. Love and Ruin is about Afghanistan.

But annoyed. For example, the initial essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. I found the argument muddled and unconvincing even though I am pretty much for reparations (or at least, as the article points out, I am completely open to studying the possibility of reparations via studies that are continually voted down by congress or the senate or whatever it is in the US that vote on these sorts of things. I’m Canadian so that whole governmental process is somewhat mysterious to me). The winning essay didn’t convince someone who already believed in the possibility. Things like this annoy me. The articles instantly stopping when, I guess, they’ve gotten to five thousand or seventy-five hundred or whatever their word limit is, rather than letting the piece be as long as it needs to be, annoyed me. Having to read three short articles on art criticism, written for other art critics, so me having really no clue what was being talked about, annoyed me. Having to read four hundred pages on my iPad rather than my kobo and getting eye strain and headaches annoyed me (although, that really isn’t the fault of the essays in this book, more the publisher. I hate reading on my iPad).

So The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 did not change my opinion of long-form magazine journalism. I’m just going to go back to flipping at random through The Economist‘s articles on the bathroom floor while waiting for Tesfa to get out of the tub. Maybe, when I stupidly request to review The Best American Magazine Writing 2016 next fall, that will be the collection that inspires me to love this type of journalism.

But probably not.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, Sid Holt editor went on sale December 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I always find it harder to write reviews for good books than for poor ones (perhaps I should really say books I enjoyed versus books I disliked since no one has, of yet, made me the supreme arbiter of what constitutes a good book. Perhaps that email mistakenly got routed to my spam folder? Feel free to send it to me again universe.) A bad book I can pick apart and be sarcastic about. A good book, what is there to say except I have read a good book?

So I have read a good book.

In A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese transplant to Angola builds a wall separating her apartment from the rest of the building during the Angolan war for independence. She stays there for thirty or forty years later until everything in the story comes together, a bit like in the most absurd of French movie farces, but more like in the tiny patterns of a pysanka, all small and perfect and fit together just so.

Okay, I went away and looked at buzzfeed for fifteen minutes. I’m back. This is what I mean, what am I supposed to say about a good book other than it’s a good book? I read it in an evening. It isn’t heavy or long. It’s like bubbles of air. It’s like reading Gabriel García Márquez — I wrote that in the margins, then saw that other reviews said that too — but other reviews also talk about magical realism and I guess I don’t know what that means because unlike in Gabriel García Márquez, there are no shrinking women or marveling at ice or ascending into the heavens. There are coincidences. There is that farce in the denouement. Like with Gabriel García Márquez, one needs to suspend disbelief, but A General Theory of Oblivion is so deftly drawn that suspending one’s disbelief is a pleasure rather than a chore, like with Gabriel García Márquez. Is that what magical realism is: an enjoyable suspension of disbelief?

I liked A General Theory of Oblivion. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t put the book down once from the first page to the last, so what I will say is what I have said: I have read a good book.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa went on sale December 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Why do I do things? My head is filled of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuff right now, so I feel like Zaphod when he realizes he’s locked off part of his brains from himself. But, instead of stealing space ships, I’m like why did I request a six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s to read? What possessed me to do that? At least I managed to request it in English and didn’t get six hundred pages of Austrian-German vernacular when my German skills are roughly on par with reading books in German that have one noun per page, i.e. Katze (underneath picture of cat), Hund (underneath picture of dog), etc.

So why do I do things? I don’t know.

So I spent the past week reading my six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s. I read an act a day, plus the intro and the glossary at the back. I have an epub and there doesn’t seem to be any clever way of getting back and forth between the glossary and the play itself (am I missing something on my kobo or is it really just not possible to do this simply), so I simply read the glossary after finishing the play. That was no real problem. Likely I missed a lot of the specific political jokes, but I don’t feel like I was really missing that much. Most of what the play says is this: the war benefits the rich, manipulates the press, and sends the poor to their deaths. So lots of fat men bemoaning a lack of butter while war amputees wander about in the foreground. About five hundred pages of this reiterated, then a descent into a Boschian bacchanal of talking hyenas and Martians. I seem to read a lot of books where aliens suddenly appear. Do I have some subliminal interest in surprise aliens? I’ll add that question to the why do I do things one.

Basically The Last Days of Mankind is an unperformable play. There are stage directions such as continue for two hours and I think something like forty googol characters. I don’t even know how one would stage certain parts, although I guess projecting film on a screen behind might solve that problem. I couldn’t help thinking that if one is going to write an unperformable play, why not recast it as a novel? I guess art comes to the artist as it comes, but essentially, long soliloquies in the play are taken from newspaper articles of the time, so there are pages and pages that already reads less like a play and more like a creative non-fiction essay. But it’s a play. So a play it is.

I know I’m sounding really down on The Last Days of Mankind, but it ends up transcending a lot of my complaints (not the one about surprise aliens though). I gave it four stars out of five. It’s surprisingly prescient for a play from the 1920s. There’s the foreshadowing of Nazis with the casual antisemitism (although Kraus was ethnically Jewish, so it isn’t necessarily his antisemitism, more a comment on the antisemitism of the time). There’s a harsh critique of globalisation. The Grumbler, Kraus himself inserted into his own play, has media critiques that would fit into any modern issue of AdBusters. It’s surprisingly readable, in part due to Kraus and in part due to the translation, which has been, as the translators explain, modernized for an English speaking audience. But it is long, and it hits many of the same points again and again: War is Hell, in a democracy we are all complicit, and those who profit from it aim to keep it going for as long as they can. I don’t know if I needed six hundred pages to hammer that point home.

And Martians.

The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, newly translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms went on sale November 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.