Scan barcode
dessuarez's reviews
111 reviews
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
adventurous
2.0
I'm not a sci-fi girlie so this didn't quite catch my interest. I will give it this though: it definitely stood out in comparison to what white people write about in this genre. It's not just a messiah story (although it is a messiah story), and not just about one's self-actualization (although it is about one's self-actualization). It manages to add just enough nuance there to come out a bit unique. This clearly speaks to the experience of POCs who are discriminated upon and whose beliefs do not coincide with their own modern ideals. It is a modern book talking about modern problems.
However it fails to untangle all of these topics with the weak emplotment. It could have been longer, sure, but the main problem is really that it wants to say too much - everything. Not even a full-length novel could have achieved that. The resolution was too easy, the denoument too uninteresting. The story seemed to have ended right in the middle, and dragged itself along all the way to the end.
However it fails to untangle all of these topics with the weak emplotment. It could have been longer, sure, but the main problem is really that it wants to say too much - everything. Not even a full-length novel could have achieved that. The resolution was too easy, the denoument too uninteresting. The story seemed to have ended right in the middle, and dragged itself along all the way to the end.
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
adventurous
hopeful
reflective
4.0
What is it about Winterson that really reminds me of Anne Carson? I struggle to find a word - it's not "simplistic," but it is simple, and yet so allusive. Not exactly philosophical, but deeply profound. Equally plural as it is precise.
I'm thinking about this (Carson):
"perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
"I lose my screams"
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams."
And how closely it resembles this (Winterson):
"He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it."
In its sincerity.
I think that's the word I'm looking for: sincere. Both women write like a heart beating, that is: rhythmic, sometimes syncopated, but sure of itself. Syntax, grammar be damned, the words will follow their own measure. You only get these with experienced writers, those who have come to trust their own instinct to create. So as a reader, you come to trust them, too. I buy every Winterson I see at the bookstore, I never look for a blurb, barely check the back cover. From such a good storyteller, I don't care what the story is. Just pick me up and whisk me away!
Lighthousekeeping is a weird one, but not for a Winterson. It's just that formally it loves to play.
Winterson has a penchant for the second person, her narrator oscillates between telling the story to you, the reader; you her mother; you her adoptive father; you her psychiatrist; you, her lover; you - herself. I love this fluidity. It reminds me of Woolf's narrators who embody a character whenever they so please.
Time is fluid in this novel, too. Analepsis and prolepsis abound. In the span of a sentence you pass through three generations. If I was being daft I'd call it magical realism, but I don't really think that's what she's trying to do...
I mean, genre? Forget about it. Is it fantasy, historical fiction, confession, romance, queer, or what? It is what the story is. That's it. If I was a narratologist I'd give myself an aneurysm trying to put it in a box.
Only a queer woman could have written something like this, because she would have embodied this fluidity all her life, so she would already have the repertoire for such an advanced practice of imagination.
There are plenty more formal elements to add to the list of reasons why this book stands out among others: the allusions, the blatant theft of historical figures to be played with like barbie dolls, her vocabulary of pleasure; these all deserve a good looking over. But like I said I'm not a narratologist and I think that's not the point anyway. When you are sincere, you don't have to explain yourself. Sincerity is implicitly felt. Just read it, and you'll feel it, and that's that. The end. Simple as listening to the heart beating in your chest.
La prochaine fois que tu mordras la poussière by Panayotis Pascot
4.0
I have not eaten well in over a week; no appetite. For anything, really. It has become a fact of my life that I get this way every now and again, and I've never not survived it, despite feeling everytime that I would die. It is an inconvenience more than anything else, and I tackle it like an inconvenience, like being stuck in a traffic jam or a long queue.
I attempt first to get rid of it. Self-medicate. When I wasn't wise yet, I did the usual: alcohol, cigarettes, drugs; and it was like those antidepressants that just made your more suicidal - just a paradox of your own making. So I tried the more common sense things: got under the sun, exercised, met up with friends, basically pretended that I was not handicapped, just a normal girl doing normal things; how could someone like me ever think of any horrible thoughts? Why, I wear so much pink! The depression gets bored and goes away. The depression is just a child. Do not play with it.
If that doesn't work (and it's already too much work for one inconvenience so it's exhausting), I give up pretty easily. I pass the time. It was more difficult before when I thought it was gonna kill me, but I've had it enough times to know, rationally, that's far from the realm of possibility. I could never kill myself, I have too much pride for that; I would never let my mother keep my body to put wherever she liked, and I could not trust my friends to leave a good eulogy. And anyway it's too many arrangements to be made. Where do I order what I need, how do I do it discreetly, how to make sure the lease is paid when I'm gone? Maybe I am just making excuses and I really don't want to die. Whatever it is, I'm still alive.
I read. I watch comedy shows and dare myself to laugh - a stupid game I play with myself in which I am the judge and the only audience member, rooting for the only contestant: come' on, now. That's how I learned about Panayotis, of course. Everything - about the parents, the insomnia, the crisis of sexuality, the inability to access simple feeling in a way that other people do so easily - was relatable to me. I've seen Presque six times, always when depressed, if not just as a way to see myself, make sure I'm still there, because looking at a mirror had become unbearable.
I translated the book with an app because, after waiting for some time, the publisher never bothered to put it out in English. A lot of meaning must have been lost in its journey from French but even then, it moved me. I think it must have moved me; I could never be sure when I am like this - everything is closed and nothing penetrates me. ("Rein ne me pénètre réellement.” Well, put, Panayotis). At the very least, I felt acknowledged.
Panayotis wants to kill his father and I my mother.
"Peut-être pardon, je veux que tu me dises pardon. Je le sens, je le sais que ça ferait du bien, je sais aussi que ce ne serait pas nécessaire, tu n'as jamais fait quelque chose en particulier qui demande le pardon, c'est ça qui est frustrant dans cette histoire sordide, tu n'as jamais fait quelque chose qui nécessite un pardon. Mais j'en veux un quand même, c'est une question de principe, tu nous as colonisés, tu es en nous, tu es en moi, tout le temps, tu me ronges et ça me fait chier.
Demande-moi pardon, j'en ai besoin. J'ai besoin de ton regard."
Me too.
I had started writing a book about it, too. It was just after the fourth therapy session when a bit of our lives had spilled out of me so unintentionally it embarrassed me, and I thought, I ought to make this more coherent.
I managed to achieve the opposite. I stopped writing after some time because I realized I had no goal. No argument. What was my mother supposed to do, kill herself? I didn't want to hurt her. Why was she being blamed for all of this anyway, just because she was first in line? But the line is long. Getting longer.
And not everything is about my mother. The depression is not genetic. She did not give it to me. It is there. It exists. I'm doing the best I can and it will go away shortly. All the talking is just passing the time. You can do it well or you can do it poorly. I just read these days, and I'm glad that I read this book because it comforted me. Like when you listen to sad songs when you are sad, you read a book about depression when you are depressed. It's company without the performance of having a fixed identity in a room full of people you could disappoint. It's good fodder for the empty days.
Educated by Tara Westover
inspiring
reflective
tense
5.0
First, let me say this: Tara is a brilliant storyteller and an expert essayist. This has to be the most coherent and well-written memoir that I have read in my life. It strikes the perfect balance between objectively stating events that have happened (with proper vetting and everything, footnotes, and acknowledging gaps and discrepancies where they exist - which we learn later is the result of her training as an intellectual historian) while still making space for the subjective experience of having lived such a hard and unbelievable life in a way that neither minimizes its impact nor lashes out at all the damage that it had wrought.
Only in the hands of a master essayist can topics so controversial and polarized be discussed with such care and respect, without excusing them or being an apologist. Tara talks about religion, domestic abuse, racism, genocide, feminism - topics that, if you do so much as use the wrong syntax, would result in so much contempt and could even get you 'cancelled', so it's amazing that never in this book did I ever want to stop listening to her, despite how problematic many of the opinions she shares from various characters in the book including herself are.
I have a lot of takeaways from this book. I was going to share about my own childhood in my small Philippine province, growing up with a mother who was a teacher and a father whose approach to learning was to hyperfixate on something until he learned it; I was going to speak at length about how I struggled with a similar dissonance when I learned that, in fact, my parents did not know everything; and how, similarly, I desperately needed to leave my town and go to university so that I could learn correctly (only to find out that what we know to be true now may not have always been true and may cease to be true in the future, and that even esteemed scholars from my great academic institution also did not know everything, that simply no one does or can); and similarly, how I realized that my life-changing education had alienated me from my own family, and that that was the cost of being free to think outside of their sphere or thought...
But I think that conversation is for my therapist.
There is something more important that I want to discuss instead. It had always irked me when in media (and honestly, in real life) poor people like Tara's family would be depicted as ignorant and incapable of the same level of reflection that rich people were capable of, and that is why they contribute to the exacerbation of climate change, the reinforcement of sexism and other injustices, and vote for the wrong presidential candidates, and so on.
I had never fully found a good argument against that that wasn't just "you are an elitist piece of shit," and the material argument that when you spend the whole day worried about where you're gonna get the money to feed yourself or your family tomorrow, where the hell could you spare a single thought to injustice, feminism, etcetera?
After reading this book, I formed a third argument. I gained a concrete and vivid understanding that in the end, regardless of the facts, what gets people to believe in anything is other people. Why? Because when you're poor, your family, your community is your lifeline, literally. The logical response to precarity is community, and a natural behavior that nourishes belongingness in the community is to conform to it - i.e. what your community believes, you will believe, not always because you were forced to do it, but just because of saturation - e.g. you see that both your mother believes in x, so you also believe in x, because why the hell shouldn't you?
And so my point is: what we perceive to be the ignorance of poor people is not exactly ignorance, but communal respect and care. Having grown up in a poor, small town, I have seen (and have been so annoyed by) the kind of internal reflections that have to be done to execute that kind of hospitality. We cannot say that poor people lack the mental capacity to reflect like richer or more educated people reflect. They do. Maybe not to a Tara Westover level but they do. It's just a different sphere of life that they are concerned with: the sphere of life that decides whether or not, if their house burns down tomorrow, will their kids have somewhere to sleep; or if a calamity hits (which it always does nowadays) will someone look for them in the rubble?
Regardless of the harmful results that this behavior (which some may call conformity while others simply hospitality) has created for our larger society, we have to acknowledge that the root of most bad things could have been well-meaning. In that way, we can start looking for solutions that would not compromise the sense of security that is provided by our communities.
In Tara's case, she had to be estranged from half of her family in order to stand for what's right, because half of her family needed the financial and social security provided by their parents in order to live. The other half that stuck with her could only do so because at the very least they did not rely on their parents financially.
I want to live in a world where you can stand for what's right without your basic needs being on the line. And since I am no Tara Westover and I am a flat out commie I will say it up front here. What I mean, explicity, is: public housing should be free, public education should be free, and health care should be free. I believe that when we free people from precarity, we effectively loosen their desire to conform to beliefs that they know to be wrong, or that at least it would be easier to educate them and for that education to actually result into action.
I believe this because I believe this. I came up with the belief myself! (1) (2)
(1) after reading this whole book and hundreds of others
(2) and also after actually going into precarious communities
Only in the hands of a master essayist can topics so controversial and polarized be discussed with such care and respect, without excusing them or being an apologist. Tara talks about religion, domestic abuse, racism, genocide, feminism - topics that, if you do so much as use the wrong syntax, would result in so much contempt and could even get you 'cancelled', so it's amazing that never in this book did I ever want to stop listening to her, despite how problematic many of the opinions she shares from various characters in the book including herself are.
I have a lot of takeaways from this book. I was going to share about my own childhood in my small Philippine province, growing up with a mother who was a teacher and a father whose approach to learning was to hyperfixate on something until he learned it; I was going to speak at length about how I struggled with a similar dissonance when I learned that, in fact, my parents did not know everything; and how, similarly, I desperately needed to leave my town and go to university so that I could learn correctly (only to find out that what we know to be true now may not have always been true and may cease to be true in the future, and that even esteemed scholars from my great academic institution also did not know everything, that simply no one does or can); and similarly, how I realized that my life-changing education had alienated me from my own family, and that that was the cost of being free to think outside of their sphere or thought...
But I think that conversation is for my therapist.
There is something more important that I want to discuss instead. It had always irked me when in media (and honestly, in real life) poor people like Tara's family would be depicted as ignorant and incapable of the same level of reflection that rich people were capable of, and that is why they contribute to the exacerbation of climate change, the reinforcement of sexism and other injustices, and vote for the wrong presidential candidates, and so on.
I had never fully found a good argument against that that wasn't just "you are an elitist piece of shit," and the material argument that when you spend the whole day worried about where you're gonna get the money to feed yourself or your family tomorrow, where the hell could you spare a single thought to injustice, feminism, etcetera?
After reading this book, I formed a third argument. I gained a concrete and vivid understanding that in the end, regardless of the facts, what gets people to believe in anything is other people. Why? Because when you're poor, your family, your community is your lifeline, literally. The logical response to precarity is community, and a natural behavior that nourishes belongingness in the community is to conform to it - i.e. what your community believes, you will believe, not always because you were forced to do it, but just because of saturation - e.g. you see that both your mother believes in x, so you also believe in x, because why the hell shouldn't you?
And so my point is: what we perceive to be the ignorance of poor people is not exactly ignorance, but communal respect and care. Having grown up in a poor, small town, I have seen (and have been so annoyed by) the kind of internal reflections that have to be done to execute that kind of hospitality. We cannot say that poor people lack the mental capacity to reflect like richer or more educated people reflect. They do. Maybe not to a Tara Westover level but they do. It's just a different sphere of life that they are concerned with: the sphere of life that decides whether or not, if their house burns down tomorrow, will their kids have somewhere to sleep; or if a calamity hits (which it always does nowadays) will someone look for them in the rubble?
Regardless of the harmful results that this behavior (which some may call conformity while others simply hospitality) has created for our larger society, we have to acknowledge that the root of most bad things could have been well-meaning. In that way, we can start looking for solutions that would not compromise the sense of security that is provided by our communities.
In Tara's case, she had to be estranged from half of her family in order to stand for what's right, because half of her family needed the financial and social security provided by their parents in order to live. The other half that stuck with her could only do so because at the very least they did not rely on their parents financially.
I want to live in a world where you can stand for what's right without your basic needs being on the line. And since I am no Tara Westover and I am a flat out commie I will say it up front here. What I mean, explicity, is: public housing should be free, public education should be free, and health care should be free. I believe that when we free people from precarity, we effectively loosen their desire to conform to beliefs that they know to be wrong, or that at least it would be easier to educate them and for that education to actually result into action.
I believe this because I believe this. I came up with the belief myself! (1) (2)
(1) after reading this whole book and hundreds of others
(2) and also after actually going into precarious communities
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Absolutely depressing but what a book to end the year with. Everyone knows that between Christmas and New Year, time doesn't really exist, and you regret everything from the past, and you're scared of everything in the future, it's a limbo period, and the only reason you're holding on is because surely something, one good thing, must be waiting for you at the end of the excruciating wait.
Buzzati's temporal pace is masterful. Days, months, years blend into this surreal blur around Drogo, stuck in his endless wait. It reminds me a lot about Beckett's temporal limbo. The guy's waiting for glory, for action, but as Godot, catharsis never comes. All we get is this poetic monotony. The novel is slow, so slow, and then it's over. Just like life, sorry to be cliche.
I'm glad I read this at 25 with hopefully half of my life I've still yet to live. I have long ago renounced the capitalist scam of Having A Career, and I greatly recommend it! I do think I've got most of the essentials down correctly, too. Greatness is overrated; the mundane isn't just mundane, it's life happening when you're not busy chasing some elusive grandeur; etc etc...
This book is a reminder of what exactly I'm trying to avoid happening in my personal life, but way more than that, it is also a reflection of the existential feelings hovering about in the 1940s, just before WW2 broke loose in Europe. It's like a mirror to the political landscape of the time – everyone's on edge, waiting for the next big global blunder, but what of life? What of dancing and singing, of falling in love, of making merry? How is life affected by an impending doom?
Our modern world is slowly starting to feel like something great and terrible is about to go down soon, too, and many times this year, we've witnessed a lot of tragedies, and we've all had to think about that question, too. How are we supposed to live our lives now, in the midst of all of it?
Those are the questions I'm asking myself as the year comes to a close, and a new one begins. I will try not to die defeated and rejected by everyone around me during this time. Happy New Year!
Buzzati's temporal pace is masterful. Days, months, years blend into this surreal blur around Drogo, stuck in his endless wait. It reminds me a lot about Beckett's temporal limbo. The guy's waiting for glory, for action, but as Godot, catharsis never comes. All we get is this poetic monotony. The novel is slow, so slow, and then it's over. Just like life, sorry to be cliche.
I'm glad I read this at 25 with hopefully half of my life I've still yet to live. I have long ago renounced the capitalist scam of Having A Career, and I greatly recommend it! I do think I've got most of the essentials down correctly, too. Greatness is overrated; the mundane isn't just mundane, it's life happening when you're not busy chasing some elusive grandeur; etc etc...
This book is a reminder of what exactly I'm trying to avoid happening in my personal life, but way more than that, it is also a reflection of the existential feelings hovering about in the 1940s, just before WW2 broke loose in Europe. It's like a mirror to the political landscape of the time – everyone's on edge, waiting for the next big global blunder, but what of life? What of dancing and singing, of falling in love, of making merry? How is life affected by an impending doom?
Our modern world is slowly starting to feel like something great and terrible is about to go down soon, too, and many times this year, we've witnessed a lot of tragedies, and we've all had to think about that question, too. How are we supposed to live our lives now, in the midst of all of it?
Those are the questions I'm asking myself as the year comes to a close, and a new one begins. I will try not to die defeated and rejected by everyone around me during this time. Happy New Year!