I usually find it kind of boring or annoying when writers write about writers (and about writers writing, especially, or even worse, about writers struggling to write), but Paul Auster has managed to do it well, both in his autobiographical Hand to Mouth (a review of which I wrote in 2006, though it was lost to the aether at the time and I never rewrote it), and in the book I’m reading now, Oracle Night.
I’ve just read Jack Womack’s second and third novels (both of books set in his “Dryco” series) back-to-back. Longtime readers will note that I lauded the first novel in the series (in terms of series timeline) with lavish praise back in 2012. I also read the Womack’s first novel, Ambient, and it made a strong impression on me at the time, but that was years and years ago, and I’m due for a reread since I’m apparently trying to read all the Dryco books this year. (Actually, when I read Ambient, I wanted nothing more than to read everything else …
When I read Thomas M. Disch’s 334 back in grad school, I found it didn’t make much of an impression on me, beyond its unremitting and overwhelming grimness. Perhaps the bleak grimness of graduate school distracted me from its finer points? I’m not sure, but I can say that the cruelty and bleakness of The Genocides has definitely made an impression on me: I have essentially devoured it over the last day-and-a-half.
I’ve mentioned Donald Clark’s book Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950 a few times lately (and it will certainly come up again), but I haven’t really summed up my thoughts on the book, something I’m trying to do a little more since falling out of the habit last year. Here are my thoughts…
When I ran across a very positive review for Yi Mun-yol’s novel The Poet over at Korean Literature in Translation, I was really excited to check the book out. It’s a novel about a poet who went by the handle Kim Sakkat–“Rain-Hat” Kim, the grandson of a rebel-leader who suffered social censure (and, almost, the execution of his whole family, in retribution for the granddad’s “crime”). The grandson becomes a poet, and then a wanderer, and arguably the first proto-rapper or beat poet in Korea… and the novel purports to explore his life story. Sound great, right? Unfortunately, I found …