Three Brief Reviews of Books I Read Recently
These books were available to me at no cost through the Libby app, which can be accessed with your library card. They can also be found at your local bookstore (link is to my local bookstore) or through bookshop.org which helps fund independent booksellers across the country.
Wuthering Heights
This title missed me in high school and I grieve that it did not find me in college when I might have had the pleasure of dissecting its wild strangeness with others. It was not what I expected. I picked it up because Anne Carson discusses it at length in her collection Blood, Glass, and God and because I wanted to make sure I could get the most out of my hate-watch of the upcoming film adaptation from Emerald Fennel.
This book is not sexy. It is weird and depressing and its narration feels as remote as the landscape in which it is set. It is an exploration of human evil, of human need, and of our capacities for meanness and endurance. A man disentures a grave at least twice and tries to hang a dog. Heathcliff is both a victim and perpetrator of misery. The book asks the question how far will miserable men go to make other people miserable? It’s answer is quite far, unto death even.
I Have Some Questions For You
I decided on listening to this book because Rebecca Makkai is writer I have heard much about, but had not read for myself. She is long listed for this years Joyce Carol Oates Prize. I nearly stopped listening to the book as soon as I started because it is vaguely a crime novel and begins, as so many crime novels do, with a dead teenage girl.
I decided to stick it out, willed myself into continuing to at least see how the author handled it. I was satisfied to do so and enjoyed the book. I think it walks an interesting line in exploring the sensation of young girl’s murder and the rippling community effects such tragedies have. It explores issues of class, privilege, and sexuality, giving them room to be complex and unanswerable questions that can’t be fully reconciled.
I Who Have Never Known Men
Don’t read this review! Go read the book and then email me so we can talk about it!
Originally published in French in 1995 by Belgian writer and psychoanalyst Jacquelin Harpman, the 2023 reissue from Transit Books has made quite a stir. The novel is short and strange. It is the story of the only child in a prison-bunker of thirty-nine other women. She narrates the story of her life, taking place after mysterious world events during which the women are abducted from their homes, lives, and families.
The world in I Who Have Never Known Men is strange and alien. Inside the bunker, the women are not allowed to touch, to console each other, or to kill themselves. They are watched perpetually by a group of silent guardsmen.
The book explores what it means to be human, to live and make in a world of bleak indifference, and what it means to love. It is a question of hope in a space beyond understanding. It is a chilling and beautiful read that has not left me.
