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jjupille's reviews
465 reviews
Spanish Testament by Arthur Koestler
slow-paced
3.0
Koestler's Act of Creation and Ghost in the Machine are really important books for me. i have sometimes called him my intellectual hero. But I didn't like Darkness at Noon very much, and this is extraordinarily important future-history reportage, but not very well written. The places where he waxes philosophical about time and death are extremely well-situated (in prison condemned to death by the Spanish fascist rebels). But they're pretty banal, some real clunkers in there.
I don't know Spanish Civil War (nor general history) very well. This was a good easy introduction to the Civil War, and I found some of the historical background and sociological analysis (e.g., that Spain was still more or less feudal across substantial swathes, and the the Church didn't really think the Inquisition was all that bad). I would like to learn more.
The best deliverable for me was analysis of "the method of terror" deployed by the fascists. He elaborates this on pp. 80-83. He has hold of a Francoist document enumerating five points around how to "instil a certain sulatory terror into the population" (p. 81). It explicitly calls for local authorities to get straightened out quickly at pain of their own and their famillies' deaths. "In every case the methods resorted to must be of a clearly spectacular and impressive character", etc. Really chilling stuff.
So Koestler is really good at showing the terrifying violence the Francist rebels were deploying. 50,000 slaughtered, I guess. 5,000 over a few bloody months in Malaga.
I also didn't know the Falangists deployed "Moors" to sow special terror, and it seems in particular were used for sexual violence and other especially terrorizing acts. AK rightly calls out the irony of Torquemadian Catholics deploying Moors on Spanish soil.
The final thing that kep jumping out at me was how clear it was to Koestler that the proceedings in Spain were mere prelude to the next great war. He put pen down in late summer 1937, edited the book in the early fall. Was that the case for any educated European at this time? I have huge holes in my reading in this period.
Anyway, I am going to Spain for the last 4-5 months of 2025 and will read more. This was OK to start.
I don't know Spanish Civil War (nor general history) very well. This was a good easy introduction to the Civil War, and I found some of the historical background and sociological analysis (e.g., that Spain was still more or less feudal across substantial swathes, and the the Church didn't really think the Inquisition was all that bad). I would like to learn more.
The best deliverable for me was analysis of "the method of terror" deployed by the fascists. He elaborates this on pp. 80-83. He has hold of a Francoist document enumerating five points around how to "instil a certain sulatory terror into the population" (p. 81). It explicitly calls for local authorities to get straightened out quickly at pain of their own and their famillies' deaths. "In every case the methods resorted to must be of a clearly spectacular and impressive character", etc. Really chilling stuff.
So Koestler is really good at showing the terrifying violence the Francist rebels were deploying. 50,000 slaughtered, I guess. 5,000 over a few bloody months in Malaga.
I also didn't know the Falangists deployed "Moors" to sow special terror, and it seems in particular were used for sexual violence and other especially terrorizing acts. AK rightly calls out the irony of Torquemadian Catholics deploying Moors on Spanish soil.
The final thing that kep jumping out at me was how clear it was to Koestler that the proceedings in Spain were mere prelude to the next great war. He put pen down in late summer 1937, edited the book in the early fall. Was that the case for any educated European at this time? I have huge holes in my reading in this period.
Anyway, I am going to Spain for the last 4-5 months of 2025 and will read more. This was OK to start.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I loved it. I maybe rate it lower than I should since it already seemed to familiar. Full of cliches, like Shakespeare. I had maybe read it once way back when, but I don't remember. So better late than never and all that.
As commentary on the end of the 60s? I guess it's commentary. I think of it more as a snapshot of post-hippie burnout in 1971, more color than commentary. But, yeah. Awesome. Raoul Duke and Gonzo Journalism - LOL.
As commentary on the end of the 60s? I guess it's commentary. I think of it more as a snapshot of post-hippie burnout in 1971, more color than commentary. But, yeah. Awesome. Raoul Duke and Gonzo Journalism - LOL.
Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I dunno, it just felt a little light to me. I see some other reviews noting its brevity for a Russian novel. I guess that's part of works less well for me. Turgenev didn't immerse me in that social world, and the characters kind of bounced off of me. I am not a fan of romanticism in many of its modes, so it could be that. I want to read more shorter Dostoevsky (Notes From The Underground) the next time I pick up a Russian.
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
dark
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
It took me forever to read this for reasons unrelated to the book and the writing. I really liked it, and may revise stars upward. I guess it's mostly about the relationship between family (love, putatively) and duty.
All the Names by José Saramago
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
I had only read _Blindness_, which blew me away, before reading this. I can't locate my copy of Blindess, whichs is a bummer because sometimes something like having it around and seeing which I made note of can help me process another one by the same author. I will check for notes on B here.
JS's writing is so delicious, so light and lyrical, lots of nicely flowing streams of consciousness which don't meander too much - just lots of well paced inner monologues. I also like how he does dialogue, rendering it into the same style, not so much what the characters speak to each other as to how the interaction flows, like a nice flat stone skipping along the surface of one person's perception.
The story, ideas? I am still processing. Defiitely, as all of the summaries say, about how we --in modern, bureaucratic society-- construct the living and the dead. The "modern bureaucratic society" angle is key for me, given that I work on human institutions in my day job. I do think institutions -- here, the state-- construct us to a great extent, certainly try to. How the state officializes us becomes who we are and who we were, after we are gone. But of course there's so much more to it than that. The state is so limited (absurdly so, in some cases) in which it can capture about us, how the methods it uses in trying to do so are just iimpossibly ill-suited to the task. The state here tries to reduce us to some basic census chracteristics, but of course we --not least as shown by the lives of Senhor José, the unnamed woman, the Registrar and, in fact, every person in the story-- are so much more complicated than that.
So we can have a name, but we remain fundamentally unknowable. Senhor J's hidden life certainly speaks to this. The shepherd's activities with the graves of the dead-by-suicide, which Senhor J thinks to expand to all denizens of the cemetery near the end, speaks to the fundamental futiility of trying to impose spare bureaucratic order on such things. And it sounds like the tail end of his career will afford Senhor J opportunity to follow that logic even further, from within the walls of the Central Ministry.
These are all just some initial ramblings. This is an absolutely delicious read. I love Saramagao so much, and now I wnat to get all of this stuff and continue having this lovely voice in my own head.
~~ random snippets of text follow ~~
"not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry ... but the smell never changes, in the first place, becaues the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factor, is to begin to grow old, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contribting its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucuous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identify as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysatnthemum" (1).
"There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angles, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of somethat that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because they the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos" (11).
"you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren't really dead, if the papers you have in your hand are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they're paper, not putrefying flesh, that was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper" (149).
"memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow" (170).
"The human spirit ... is the favorite home of contradictions, indeed they do not seem to prosper or even find viable living conditions outside it" (228).
JS's writing is so delicious, so light and lyrical, lots of nicely flowing streams of consciousness which don't meander too much - just lots of well paced inner monologues. I also like how he does dialogue, rendering it into the same style, not so much what the characters speak to each other as to how the interaction flows, like a nice flat stone skipping along the surface of one person's perception.
The story, ideas? I am still processing. Defiitely, as all of the summaries say, about how we --in modern, bureaucratic society-- construct the living and the dead. The "modern bureaucratic society" angle is key for me, given that I work on human institutions in my day job. I do think institutions -- here, the state-- construct us to a great extent, certainly try to. How the state officializes us becomes who we are and who we were, after we are gone. But of course there's so much more to it than that. The state is so limited (absurdly so, in some cases) in which it can capture about us, how the methods it uses in trying to do so are just iimpossibly ill-suited to the task. The state here tries to reduce us to some basic census chracteristics, but of course we --not least as shown by the lives of Senhor José, the unnamed woman, the Registrar and, in fact, every person in the story-- are so much more complicated than that.
So we can have a name, but we remain fundamentally unknowable. Senhor J's hidden life certainly speaks to this. The shepherd's activities with the graves of the dead-by-suicide, which Senhor J thinks to expand to all denizens of the cemetery near the end, speaks to the fundamental futiility of trying to impose spare bureaucratic order on such things. And it sounds like the tail end of his career will afford Senhor J opportunity to follow that logic even further, from within the walls of the Central Ministry.
These are all just some initial ramblings. This is an absolutely delicious read. I love Saramagao so much, and now I wnat to get all of this stuff and continue having this lovely voice in my own head.
~~ random snippets of text follow ~~
"not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry ... but the smell never changes, in the first place, becaues the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factor, is to begin to grow old, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contribting its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucuous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identify as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysatnthemum" (1).
"There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angles, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of somethat that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because they the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos" (11).
"you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren't really dead, if the papers you have in your hand are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they're paper, not putrefying flesh, that was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper" (149).
"memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow" (170).
"The human spirit ... is the favorite home of contradictions, indeed they do not seem to prosper or even find viable living conditions outside it" (228).
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Totally fascinating, challenging for me until I gave in to the rhythms.
Just a few quick updates.
1) the modern city. Pretty obvious, but I guess I came across someone saying this is a very early book to capture the shattering dysphonia, the choppy rhythms, the sensory overload, the vast multitude of the modern (i.e., automobile-era) city. I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not, but it certainly captures all of that amazingly.
2) micro-macro. So, clearly, Franz Bieberkopf isn't really in control of his own destiny. Beyond his impulsiveness and lack of rational decisionmaking and planning, he is buffeted by social structures far beyond not only his control, but his very reckoning. There's something Döblin is doing, with the very micro/local focus on FB and Berlin Alexanderplatz, the one little part of the vast city, that I can't quite put my finger on by that is very effective. It's almost Foucauldian in showing how the huge shit goes all the way down to the capillary. He really captures how any other particular/local manifestations would be completely different in their details, because there's just so much arbitrariness going on, while still operating by the same principles that we are all pretty well fucked to deal, in our partial ways, with whatever life imposes on us. So there's a lot of interest structure-agency, macro-micro, gestalt kind of stuff happening here.
Final note: after putting it down, I rated it 3.75. I think I was just a little exhausted, depleted. Here, maybe a week or ten days later, I have upgraded to 4.25. Why? Because the book is still swirling around in my head. I love when that happens, and that's always to the book's credit.
Just a few quick updates.
1) the modern city. Pretty obvious, but I guess I came across someone saying this is a very early book to capture the shattering dysphonia, the choppy rhythms, the sensory overload, the vast multitude of the modern (i.e., automobile-era) city. I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not, but it certainly captures all of that amazingly.
2) micro-macro. So, clearly, Franz Bieberkopf isn't really in control of his own destiny. Beyond his impulsiveness and lack of rational decisionmaking and planning, he is buffeted by social structures far beyond not only his control, but his very reckoning. There's something Döblin is doing, with the very micro/local focus on FB and Berlin Alexanderplatz, the one little part of the vast city, that I can't quite put my finger on by that is very effective. It's almost Foucauldian in showing how the huge shit goes all the way down to the capillary. He really captures how any other particular/local manifestations would be completely different in their details, because there's just so much arbitrariness going on, while still operating by the same principles that we are all pretty well fucked to deal, in our partial ways, with whatever life imposes on us. So there's a lot of interest structure-agency, macro-micro, gestalt kind of stuff happening here.
Final note: after putting it down, I rated it 3.75. I think I was just a little exhausted, depleted. Here, maybe a week or ten days later, I have upgraded to 4.25. Why? Because the book is still swirling around in my head. I love when that happens, and that's always to the book's credit.
Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka
medium-paced
4.5
Ahhh, Kafka. Kafka Kafka Kafka. So Kafka. Little Karl Rossmann is such a little sweetie. One feels so bad for him as the world does what the world does, but he is so plucky, so steadfast, so imperturbible, I absolutely adore him. The sharpest contrast between this one and The Trial and The Castle for me is that the world confronting the protagonist here has less of an internal logic (a logic of its own). In the other two, the world operates by very strict rules, which seem perfectly clear to all of the occupants of all of the other roles while of course being perfectly inscrutable to the protagonist (and the reader). I guess that's still true here, but things are more diffuse. Instead of just the legal or administrative system, Karl is confronted with many different social orders, each of them with its own logic. I suspect the words above don't make much sense. It's just that rather than a narrow organizational context or "institutional logic" many different orders come into play here.
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
inspiring
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
4.0
This ended up being super sweet for me!