Let’s read a book about having sex with a dead squid. Because that happens in this book. Somehow I have an ability to pick out books like this. I suppose it’s a gift. Just something about me that makes me me.

(Squid sex is only like two pages of three hundred and fifty, but I feel it’s one of those things that sort of encapsulates what type of book a book is.)

The Sympathizer is a long book that could have been about one hundred and fifty pages shorter. It’s a book of contradictions, such as the narrator incensed about other people erasing his comrades’ proper names, ignoring the fact that he doesn’t give proper names to a bunch of people either. It’s a book where you keep thinking there’s going to be a flashback with an origin story, except that flashback never comes. There’s a lot of adjectives and description and over-writing, those stylistic quirks that other people find charming or engrossing, but which I just get annoyed with. And I got annoyed.

Repeatedly.

There’s some stuff that isn’t so bad. I appreciate the narrator tells you right away he’s a double-agent. None of this sudden-surprise-twist-ending nonsense that has become so popular. He’s a double-agent, his one friend Man is a communist, and his other friend Bon, is not. This is where the one hundred and fifty pages of completely transparent criticism of Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now could be cut (What’s the point of that sidetrack? Unnecessary. Lose it.) and replaced with something, even a sentence of why, of three close friends, one-third went to one ideology, while two-thirds went to another.

The book isn’t free of some twists, although they are obvious so I don’t know if one can call them that. I’ll say reveals instead I suppose. There’s a lot of what I call blah blah blah political discussions, as one might assume would happen at the locale in which they happen in the novel (trying to avoid spoilers I am).

I don’t know. It took me forever to read this book. I feel bad saying anything negative about it since the author clearly worked hard. So I’ll say nothing and laugh because nothing ends up being vital to the story: Nothing is less precious than a bad review.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen went on sale April 7, 2015.

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

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison

Hence the most important question facing any young writer may well be: How often should I masturbate and when? — David Gordon

Let’s get this out of the way first: David Gordon can write. Every scene, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous or random, feels natural. Even cliché’d ones, like getting punched in the face by a big, burly, male relative of the girl he was hitting on, feel natural. Like these are stories your buddy would tell you at a bar, if you had the sort of buddy who frequently gets punched in the face (I don’t, but I assume other people do).

So Gordon can write. He is a good writer. He is a great writer. We can probably say he is a fucking amazing writer —

— who then writes a bunch of stories about how women sleep with him, some dreams (actual zzzz ones, not aspirations), some drug trips, and, as well, a vampire because really that’s just the sort of thing that keeps happening in the books I read lately (see here and here). So we can pretty much sum up my feeling on that with my review of 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reading about white guys getting boinked, doing drugs, and futzing about bores me.

But Gordon can write, my mind reminds me. He writes so well.

And he’s clearly written the novel (well, short story collection) he wants to read, where lots and lots and lots of women want to have sex with him, and I’ll say him for while the stories aren’t all about David Gordon, there’s a similar tonality and voice that goes through all the stories, even in the ones when David is called Larry. And the sex is about as erotic as waiting around for an airplane to de-ice, my mind answers itself back.

Some people might find planes de-icing erotic.

I feel we’re missing the point. I have twenty-nine annotations I made in my kobo on White Tiger on Snow Mountain. Twenty-eight of them are about women improbably attracted to Gordon. One is about being a writer. I suppose two, if you take the quote above since that’s less about women being attracted to Gordon than just about sex. Also, I stopped making these annotations part way through, so there are likely more.

But Gordon can write. He writes so well, my mind says again.

So good writer writing a bunch of stuff I do not care about one tiny little minute epsilon bit. So do I rank this book on the writing (5/5) or the tedious content (1/5)?

David Gordon can write. Really fucking well. Let’s just leave it at that.

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon went on sale November 28, 2014.

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

I’ve figured out the Netgalley system: Get books that have been translated into English. Even better if they are by POC. Even even better if WOC. For example, Nowhere to Be Found, you don’t even have to request it; it’s just there ready for download. I spent thirty minutes with it, finished, and then thought about what to write for two days.

Nowhere to Be Found is a series of scenes. Each scene is like a perfect little wrapped truffle, but it’s like the box of these truffles has been shaken up and that little sheet of paper that tells you what each truffle is has been lost. So we have smooth bits and then inelegant jumps. There’s a bizarre shift partway through to a second-person, sadomasochistic narration, some of which repeats in first person at the very end (my kobo note when I got to that part: WTF?). There’s a whole absurd traipsing through an army training field to find someone who has a name-doppelgänger, then who doesn’t. There’s some subtlety about class in Korean society that is touched on but likely not explored as the story was initially written for a Korean audience, who don’t need their society explained to them the way I might. There’s some esoteric references (The Blue Bird, but maybe smarter people than me knew what that was already). There’s some cattiness and shaming:

the girl who was called the Black Hole because of her reputation for routinely going through multiple guys in one night.

Then the novella ends with:

And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.

I don’t really get it.

I like all the little components, but I’m not sure I like them once they’re put together. It’s less than the sum of all parts. That isn’t to say I’m not going to steal some ideas from it to see what I can do with them instead. But this novella is a bit off. Not alien abduction off, but just not enough that I can really, unabashedly feel good about the experience.

And of course, my burning question with no real relevance to anything about this novella: why is Be capitalized in the title, but not to? The to Be is like a unit. Shouldn’t they both be or not both be capitalized?

I think Nowhere to Be Found is going to be released as one of those Amazon Singles things or something. It’s short – forty pages. So a quick read.

Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah goes on sale April 14, 2015.

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

This review contains spoilers, but no more than you would get by reading the interview with the author at the start of the book.

Let’s start on the first page, in the interview with Chiladze (I’m not quite sure who is interviewing him, the book itself or the aliens or the translator or a random person):

[A] writer is the last surveying representative of the ancient caste of clairvoyants or oracles.

A very astute quote as I had a weird, anticipatory relationship with this book. Each time I thought “What’s going on here?” or “Why did we go through all that stuff with Ia and Tamriko” (I’ve also established that my new favourite name is Ia) or “How does this all tie together”, the the next page, bam it’s answered. Clearly, we have the relationship between author and reader that he discusses in the introduction. So me and Chiladze, hanging out, him waiting for me to get to the next part, at least in some sort of weird, metaphysical readers/authors space.

Yeah, and that’s not even the weird part of the story. We haven’t got there yet.

The Brueghel Moon is a novella about a psychiatrist, Levan, who has a former patient, Nunu, visit him, then he goes to a garden party, and gets involved with the wife of an ambassador, Ana-Maria. Actually, the time line is a bit messed up so Levan might have gone to the garden party and then had Nunu visit him. It doesn’t matter; the point of the book isn’t about time. There’s only ninety pages, so not much can happen. Levan, who starts out the book whining about white man problems, i.e. he’s middle class and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging, spends a fair amount of the book whining about white man problems and ends the book still trapped in his white man problems. Ana-Maria also whines a fair deal about her rich white woman problems, i.e. she’s rich and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging. Nunu doesn’t whine so much. Instead, she talks about how she had sex with aliens and begat a child and I would say this was a spoiler except it’s pretty much discussed in the opening interview of the first four or five pages of the book, completely ruining any surprise or impact that alien sex (very vanilla and barely described, besides the alien appears to be roughly human) might have had. Come on. Alien, out of nowhere versus alien foretold? Alien out of nowhere has got to win at all costs.

In any case, the alien story comes around and joins with the Ana-Maria story, all nicely wrapped up in a bow, and it’s kind of satisfying. I appreciate in a novel with a psychiatrist, there’s none of this “Is Nunu’s story real or is Nunu’s story a hallucination” subplot because I’m totally over that as a literary device. I don’t really know why Ana-Maria would be interested in Levan, other than I guess he was kind to her. He’s too whiny for my taste. Levan seems interested in Ana-Maria for the reason men are often interested in women in stories: she is attractive. Other than that, her personality is kind of dull too. Nunu was pretty awesome, but, likely as to her growing up under Soviet rule, she’s a bit passive and accepting of what happens to her too, although her escape from the mental hospital was pretty awesome. You go Nunu, you get your whistle and march on away.

Still, and I feel I need to keep belabouring this point, there are aliens that appear in this novella. Aliens.

The narrative switches around, first person, second person, third person, back to first. We get to see inside Levan and Nunu’s head, never Ana-Maria’s, but since Ana-Maria seems to vocalize every thought she has to Levan, we’re likely not missing much. The switching narrative voice works pretty well with the swaps sometimes being so subtle that it takes a page or two before you realize that now we’re back inside Levan’s head or the like. Normally narrative switching bothers me, but this was done well. Conversations seem artificial, a lot of “Now I will explain some point” but I don’t know how the Georgian language works, so maybe that’s more a structure of the language and the translation. There’s a few shout-outs to Tolstoi: happy families becoming unhappy and the like. It’s a decent, short read. I’m glad it wasn’t any longer.

Really, I don’t know what else to say. Aliens.

The Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze went on sale January 13, 2015.

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