2025 has already been a bit of a busy year for me. In addition to chipping away at a library sciences masters program and working on various projects (Project Tomodachi, noise albums, and collage/paintings) I have also been trying to get back in the habit of absorbing more art recreationally in my downtime. I was recently finally put back on an ADHD medication which has helped my focus significantly particularly when it comes to reading, so I ideally want to stick with it and hopefully make little blog posts throughout this year of some books I've found the time to read. So without further ado here is...
What I Read (February 2025)
The first book I managed to complete this year is my second exposure to the work of Krasznahorkai, after initially reading Sátántangó last year (easily my favorite novel I read in 2024). Over the past year I've become a lot more familiar with the work of Béla Tarr, and have found myself compelled to dig deeper into the works of his primary screenwriter's own literary repertoire, and have sincerely never encountered anything quite like his work. His novels are dense, esoteric, and undeniably require a good deal of willpower and concentration to properly digest. I would not fault anyone for finding his work too strange or cryptic to properly enjoy, but for me he truly hits the spot in a way few authors do. Often his chapters are solid blocks of text, devoid of the typical markers denoting paragraphs which signal distinctions of thoughts or actions amongst characters, scenes, and plot progressions. In a way, to read a Krasznahorkai is to be hypnotized, to find yourself lulled into a somnabulant state where you almost stumble through the text much as many of his characters wander towards nowhere in particular, forever trapped in their own thoughts as their bodies carry them from point A to point B.
This comparison is even more apt when concerning this novel, the source for Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies." A captivating narrative that feels crushingly, godlessly "real", while still carrying a disquieting sense of the unknown, there is surely a thin gossamer of magic residue that overlays the events of the story, which concerns a Hungarian town that is turned upside down by the arrival of a "circus" (in reality a single attraction: a taxidermied whale carcass) and the ways two factions exploit the emotions, fears, and unfulfilled desires of the townsfolk. While I do personally feel Tarr's adaptation distills the novel into its finest elements, leaving some details much more vague and elusive, I deeply appreciate this book for granting me some additional context for certain scenes, as well as more fleshed out motivations for several characters.
When he wanders away from the story and drifts further into the realm of poetic imagery, Krasznahorkai's prose often feels like an insidious autopsy of the world, which seeks to pry open the very essence of the universe and reveal the harsh truth that even when you dig to the center of the Earth, or brave the voyage to the other side of a black hole, we will find no satisfactory answers, no closure to our absurd existence. All we will find is decay, a deep spiritual rot that began long before we ever blighted the earth with our presence, and which has already cleaned away even the faintest hieroglyphics with which we could decode our world's origins and purpose. In a way, I am reminded of the work of Thomas Ligotti if he was to dispense with the formalities of horror as a genre, and committed to a dry and vile world where the only beasts are the ones sprung forth from nature's womb, cursed to shamble like zombies through life, operating as little more than petty cancerous organisms that do not even realize their only goal: the prolonged suicide of material reality.
One of my close friends recommended this to me as part of my "Project Tomodachi" goal for 2025, and frankly I'm as shocked as everyone else it took me this long to read one of the more popular and celebrated texts of Jewish identity and struggle. Somehow I always ended up in the classes that didn't teach or require it in school, even when I was taking history classes in college that specialized in discussions of antisemitism and the long-reaching effects of the Shoah. I think already at that age, I had been a little bit predisposed to the ideas of how impossible it is to truly make "art" of one of the worst atrocities of human history, and let it hold me back from giving it a dedicated read for a long time as I began to prioritize literature like Survival in Auschwitz (Levi) and Neighbors (Gross). There's a lot to live up to for a book like this, both because of how immense the weight of that subject is to begin with, and because of the accolades this comic has garnered over time. Thankfully, I believe Art Spiegelman handles the subject at hand very gracefully.
One of the ways I feel he handles this subject matter so delicately is by allowing his father to really express the Shoah not as it happened from an overhead view, but as he experienced life and saw the slow rise of the Nazis. While I'm certain Art's depiction of his father is colored somewhat by his own experiences and difficulties with him, the Vladek we're allowed to see throughout Maus is an incredibly human man, someone who isn't solely defined by victimhood and persecution, but who also struggles with the smaller, more mundane trials of life, both before and after his imprisonment in Auschwitz. He is charming, funny, insufferable, exasperating, and stubborn all at once. While his experiences in Europe are essential to his life story, I found the modern-day sequences detailing the various recording sessions and casual interactions with his son to be the most compelling aspect of the comic, and I began to see a lot of the way my dad and I have bickered and struggled to understand each other within Vladek and Art's love-hate relationship with each other.
There's also a lot of valuable insight on Art's part regarding the duty he has documenting these events. Throughout Maus, he begins pondering over the ways in which he should best illustrate a time and place he never experienced, while grappling with the pressure to avoid sensationalizing such morose history and even questioning the ways his honest depictions of his father's flaws and eccentricities could be taken as reinforcing the very antisemitic stereotypes that led to the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people. Maus is an incredibly personal text for the Spiegelmans and it shows, both through the primary narrative and the clever postmodern elements where Art's other works and traumas begin to surface and drive the narrative as he struggles to complete the Herculean task he set for himself. Overall, this was truly a fantastic read, and one I will happily encourage everyone to read at least once.
One of my longest and dearest friends asked me to read this book, and knowing where his tastes usually lie I was ecstatic to check this out. He's always been such an insightful and deeply empathetic person who I feel is often able to make me appreciate the emotional depths of art so much more, particularly whenever we get together for our movie club each weekend. Our tastes often overlap, and when they differ, I feel often that his perspective really helps me reconsider my own opinions. While I do feel discussing the novel with him helped me glean a bit more of admiration for the narrative, I'd be lying if I said it made me completely change my thoughts.
I unfortunately found this book to be rather excessive and fractured in the way it decided to tell its story. There is undeniably an intent by the author to create a disorienting structure to her narrative, accentuating how we never really live linearly, but instead are always swimming in the ocean of our own memories and experiences, but even with this artistic intent I feel often the novel did a poor job of conveying what information was important to take in and what was merely flavor text. On that note, the novel has a writing style that at first I found quite sensuous and poetic, filled with painterly descriptions and spiritual significance. As the novel goes on however, I felt myself becoming bored with the lyrical quality of the writing, and hoped and prayed again and again in vain for the narrative to take a sharp turn into a more grounded language that emphasized the real issues at the heart of this novel. Even in the few moments where I felt the novel managed to address much more serious and disturbing themes, often they felt like they were never given the time to fully develop into vital elements of the story, with one particular plot point feeling in retrospect a bit too mean-spirited and forced in creating additional conflict and tragedy.
There's a part of me that hopes I'll pick this up again in a few years and slap myself on the head for not attaching to it before, but I'm also not all that eager to revisit this one when there are so many other books I feel I'm much more overdue to revisit. Overall, I want to again clarify I did not think this was the worst book in the world or some immoral/unconscionable/tasteless/exploitative drivel. There is clearly a lot of heart and thought placed into the setting and characters by the author, and I would love to read interviews with her to glean more about what her goals with this book were. Alas, this one wasn't for me, but maybe one day it will be!
What a lovely little novel this was. The narrative technique of the long-form monologue is one I am quite fond of both in more sprawling epic narratives where the voice of the storyteller regales the reader with a comprehensive overview of their life and in more compact forms that focus on the events of a single encounter. Within this story, an aging general has a tense and awkward reunion with a childhood friend who he hasn't seen in several decades. The vast majority of the story unfolds in a dining hall as these two old souls slowly unearth all the simmering tension that has laid dormant. As the night goes on and we learn more about what caused such distance between two friends, you begin to realize how masterfully Márai has pulled the wool over your eyes.
While there are not any truly earth-shattering revelations that require intense analysis to fully unpack, there is a very deceptive simplicity to the story, and especially to the way the narrator divulges information. Rather than prolonged gesturing at grander concepts of class disparity, lost love, regret, shame et al., there is a thoughtful plainness in the ways these themes and questions bake themselves into the conflict between the two leads. Things that in other novels may have been ceaselessly expounded upon and turned into moral lectures feel much more matter of fact and blunt here, just passive realities of the situation at hand.
From beginning to end I was hooked, and I found the conclusion deeply satisfying. It's rare I find a morally-complex novel that really understands the power of brevity in creating so much more focused and impactful observations about our lives, but Márai pulls it off with flying colors here. I am unsure if any other novels of his have been translated into English yet but if they have, you can be sure to see them on future journal entries here.
The other two stories by Krasznahorkai I managed to complete this month were bound together in a single volume. While I'm unsure if they have been this way since their original publication in Hungary or if the decision was a more retrospective one, the two stories presented here absolutely feel made for each other. Both stories deal with questions of our role in the lives of animals, and explore the weight of our sins when confronted with the sobering realization that our actions and goals could be more shortsighted than we once thought, and even more haunting, how we may have been manipulated by money and society into becoming a tool that advances the suffering of others.
The first story, The Last Wolf, is the weaker of the two in my opinion. This is not to say it is a bad story at all. In fact, I find its conclusion quite profound and emblematic of that kind of fruitless search for closure in Krasznahorkai's work. I just feel on the whole, as compelling as the central narrative of a man tasked with documenting a story about the extinction of the final wolf is, the interactions between the narrator and the bartender he's regaling the events to is a little lacking and doesn't feel essential to either the narrative of the writer's experiences in Extremadura, nor to his personal reckoning with how he has chosen to reflect on and recount the story to others going forward. Written in one massive unbroken sentence branching over 70 pages, The Last Wolf feels at times like a less complete draft of ideas and writing techniques that Krasznahorkai continued to develop in his longer works.
The second story, Herman, is divided into two chapters which offer two perspectives of the same events. Within this story, a game warden (the titular Herman) becomes disillusioned with the senseless cruelty he has been paid to carry out with purging wildlife from a forest, which rapidly takes him down a dark road of retributive justice. The second chapter of the story concerns a group of travelers who pass through the area as these strange events occur, and through this more detached perspective of events we not only glean more about the sequence of Herman's actions, but also become more familiar with the lingering miasma of dread those actions begin to have on the townsfolk who will continue to live in such proximity to the incident. Herman is a much more succinct story, and manages to carry a lot of the same emotional beats as Last Wolf while feeling like there is less room for dead air and digressions. Instead, the same subjective drive of how we choose to tell stories and cast ourselves within their events offers a much less imposed solemnity that seems to gesture at itself, and allows the events and actions to speak for themselves. In short, while The Last Wolf feels like it has a grand point to make at the end, Herman feels like a ghost story of our species' greatest shames, leaving the reader just as uncertain of how to unpack tragedy, afraid that if we open this Pandora's box we will see there is no more subtle message to take away, only the cold hard truth of our own selfishness.
With the recent Guadagnino adaptation coming to streaming (and hopefully physical disc) soon, I had to make sure I finally got this one off my bucket list before seeing how he decides to express Burroughs' deeply personal struggles with sexual expression and dependency, be it romantic or chemical in origin. This book quite simply was marvelous. I enjoyed Naked Lunch quite a fair bit when I read it some years ago, and I've always been a fan of the various other smatterings of Burroughs' work I've encountered, but this was the first time something of his truly felt like it dug into my soul.
Throughout Queer, Burroughs' self-insert William Lee truly embodies the listlessness of unrequited longing, and evolves rapidly from a mirror for the author into a manifestation of the thoughts and feelings so many gay men no doubt felt in the 1950s, and would continue to feel for decades after. At various points in the story, Lee turns his gaze inward and conjures up beautiful observations about his own desire, and paints these eerie haunting moments of living like a ghost while you're alive, only able to offer invisible touches and strokes to those you wish to comfort and confide in. Unlike many morally complex narrators of literature, there is also very little duplicity on Lee's part with regard to his more toxic and shameful aspects. Likewise, there is never a reckless romanticization of these failures either, instead resulting in a very solemn and painfully self-aware portrait of a man who can see what he truly yearns for but is too aware of his own insecurities to ever fully reach out and pursue them until it is too late.
Burroughs understood better than most artists the stain being labeled "homosexual" as a man places on one within social situations, and how to be queer has the unfortunate curse of permanently alienating you, casting your identity into something 'other', something that feels lonesome and suffocating even when surrounded by like-minded people. There is an almost martyr-esque quality to the suffering Lee experiences throughout his sexual escapades haunting the streets of Mexico City, a feeling he himself acknowledges when musing on the sound advice an older queen named Bobo dispensed to him in the midst of his most self-loathing days:
"[Bobo] taught me I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."
I sincerely cannot wait to reread this book again and again and again. It is such a perfect length for such a meaningful and confessional exploration of the search for happiness and acceptance in such a hostile world, and never feels the need to dip into exaggerated melodrama and misery porn to get its point across. Instead, it is a narrative as beautifully incomplete and flawed as its narrator.
On impulse, I decided to pick up this one on the title alone, especially after finding out it was a relatively short fiction story and wasn't a lengthy tome like 2666 which I read some years ago. I found this novel simply mesmerizing and so admirable in its commitment to its own inner world. Some may call this novel repetitive or say it only has one or two "points" to make, but I have to disagree. I find this book incredibly capable of juggling a lot of moving pieces, often requiring revisiting previous chapters to see just how fully the web connects of all the evil of the world. Bolaño's writing here is truly inspiring, and has a subtle shift in tone so miniscule, one might not realize the building animosity of the text until the final chapter. He also manages to capture complex themes of the role of literature and art's role in the formation of fascist ideologies, the shift towards more fringe and insidious avenues of spreading hate as certain beliefs fell more out of view with the Americas' standards, and the ways our own histories and experiences alter how we interpret our past actions, while deceiving ourselves of the true sequence of events in our darkest and weakest moments. Truly fantastic book with a lot of surprising depth well worth anyone's time.
A couple of my best friends are Polish, and I've wanted to do a better job of learning about my friends' cultures and their artistic output. I'm a big fan of the few Polish films I've seen, but I'm not very familiar with the literature. I decided to pick this book up because of its Nobel Prize sticker and the fact Agnieszka Holland adapted this novel to film a couple of years ago.I enjoyed this novel, but I found it a bit tedious to get through at times, and many of what could be called the twists of the story feel very obvious and lacking in any real substance to chew on, save for the penultimate chapter of the book which is fantastic and really adds some much-needed depth to a character who often felt too bogged down in her quirks and superstitions for her own good, even as a purposeful tool of annoyance/misdirection by the author. While I feel I would read another novel by her for sure, I'm certainly not placing it very high on my priorities.
The other Bolaño book I managed to read this month is this epic sprawling monologue. I loved this book, loved loved loved it. I was a bit shocked at first when I opened it and discovered it was written in a similar monolithic, unstoppable deluge of thoughts and dialogues akin to a Krasznahorkai novel, but once I got going I found it a lot easier to ride along with than something like Satantango. There's a lot of honesty in Bolaño's work when it comes to literature as an art form. You can tell he thought often about his own role as a writer, and the dangerous power it wields, how quickly a few writers' ideas can reshape entire continents, and cause countless deaths.
Even as someone that knows very little of Chile's political history, this book felt very natural in the way it divulged information and explored the various tragedies of the Allende and Pinochet eras, so that I never felt left behind in the severity of certain figures and events manifesting throughout the main character's confessions. While I think I might prefer Nazi Literatures in the Americas to this, I can't deny this is a much easier to recommend book and one that I think many people could warm up to very quickly. The main character is very empathetic and tragic and pitiful all at once, and his memories are filled with such beautiful descriptions and details, only for certain sections to cut so much deeper in how curt and reserved he becomes in his language as his creative spirit becomes stifled. If you're looking for a Bolaño to get into, I'd definitely say I recommend this one first of the three novels I've completed.
The last thing I read this month was this famous short novella from Japan. I've seen the anime adaptation of the story before and found it quite beautiful (if a little carried by the animation) and presumed the novel would add a dimension the more elliptical side of the film was lacking, but it turns out I really appreciate the hypnotic elements of the story much more in motion. The novel is decent enough and has a nice structure with the various stops and characters along the train, but some of the descriptions felt dull and limp. There's a chance this could just be an issue with the translator for the particular copy I read, but based on my relationship with the film prior it also makes sense if the ambitious and spiritual tone of this story doesn't fully digest for me but instead kind of lingers in the air in a way where I feel like "yeah I get it." I'm just now realizing too though this may be because Miyazawa's stories were geared towards younger audiences. Regardless, I think it's a story worth reading and quite beautiful at times, but also a bit repetitive and favoring breadth over depth with its more philosophical aspects.