i read every single word of this book, in fact, i listened to every single word of this book, which for some doesn't count as reading, but surely it mi read every single word of this book, in fact, i listened to every single word of this book, which for some doesn't count as reading, but surely it must count as listening -- so this is what i did, i listened to this book, carefully, raptly i dare say, and when i wasn't sure i had understood exactly what was being said i went back and listened again. i think i can honestly say that, in this fashion, i listened to it twice (i also slowed it down a bit to understand better). i put some good hours into this book, is what i am saying. this is a necessary premise cuz a ton of people have felt authorized to pronounce about this book without having read it or having read only a bit of it. nope, not me, i read the whole thing.
sandra newman's imagination is wild and unruly. this is my opinion, which is based on reading two more of her books and also her tweets. she is an imaginative force of nature. this book is wild and unruly, bites way more than it can chew, tackles everything but the kitchen sink, and leaves you entirely dazed and mystified.
this is what this book is not particularly interested in (again, in my opinion, based on above):
- gender
i have no earthly idea why newman decided to start the book with the disappearance of all men, and why she decided that "man" was someone with a Y chromosome, thus ignoring the key gender-identifying elements of personal choice, self-identification, genetic variations, and social positioning. the outcome is that a whole lot of men stay and a whole lot of women go. my guess is that someone told sandra that, hey, this may rub some folks up the wrong way, to which she responded by adding lines here and there that indicated she was aware this was not the ideal way to split men from women.
but the thing is, it really doesn't matter. because NOTHING in the book would be different if the men had stayed. and the reason for this is that newman chooses to tell the story of basically two characters, whose past is full of men obviously, and whose present is, yes, affected by the lack of (some) man around, but also, not really? imagine every scene and then imagine all men being around, and nothing will change. nothing, you might say, but the last scene. and i'll tell you that (view spoiler)[female cops kill people too (hide spoiler)]. there, problem solved. ((view spoiler)[precisely because female cops kill people too, that scene and all that plays out around it makes no sense; next time have the cops disappear, sandra (hide spoiler)]).
the men who disappear show up in a series of surrealistic films shot apparently in real time and streaming on the internet. they are set in the future (yes, the timeline is wonky). the future is grim. in the meantime, with most men gone, the narrow corner of the world newman exposes us to (the book is startlingly uninterested in the wide world) is less polluted and busy, probably under the rationale that men do most of the technical work of getting gas and coal out of the earth and running engines and large industrial complexes. that's it. that's all the absence of most men does. the thing under spoiler tags and less pollution and traffic.
well, there is also the fact that women walk around less scared or decidedly not scared, dressed any which way they like, something i frankly thought quite desirable and true (fuck you, violent patriarchy).
what this book is more interested in:
- lesbian relations - madness - trauma - incarceration (the incarceration of women in particular) - anti-black violence on the part of the police and white people, male and female
if you think this is too much to tackle in one book, you are right. if you think it's tackled fast and furiously, you are right too.
i like that a white woman decided to address head-on white people's violence against black people. it should be done more often. i don't know newman does it well. she does it from the pov of a black woman, and i think white people should do a lot more work addressing the white pov, but hey, A for effort.
would i re-read this book? YES. sandra newman is a phenomenal writer and even when her books are messy they are worth reading. at the very least, they are fun and gripping, they touch you in the feels, and they make you think.
would i recommend it to you? why yes i would. give it a try. see what you think. come back and tell me. if you read less than 100% of the book tho, i may not want to engage with you. cuz that's silly, isn't it. the whole damn thing is so silly....more
i read this book without knowing a thing about it and i think this worked best for me. if you are like me, maybe do the same (and stop reading this rei read this book without knowing a thing about it and i think this worked best for me. if you are like me, maybe do the same (and stop reading this review).
the first interviews read like prose poems. in fact the entire book reads like a collection of prose poems but once you start getting a sense of what is going on the plot naturally takes over and you lose (at least partly) the sense of the language in favor of the narrative. there is a longing, in these early prose poems, for intimacy, for touch, for smell. lots of smell. then memories kick in, beautiful memories of things lost, not sad, just gorgeous memories of things no longer accessible. but is memory of things beautiful and lost not intrinsically sad? i am struck by the newfangled trend about "making memories," think, wait, you have this thing now, don't make memories, enjoy the thing! there is such a sense of the inevitable passing of (good) things in the urge to make memories. how sad.
but we are a sad humanity right now, aren't we? we are catapulting toward extinction, and we are doing it gracelessly and with rage toward each other. one could have expected some coming together but there is instead a decided growing apart. a refusal to live. a refusal to love enough to survive.
this book examines corporeality, the sensory things that make us vibrate. it examines joy, intimacy, connection. it also examines our relation to time, to each other, and, above all, literally (this is a little giveaway), what it means to be and become fully human. ultimately, The Employees is about how the humanity in us grows and expands in all its unruly ways, wild and irrepressible, even when we try to be good employees, good citizens, good members of the machine. (view spoiler)[the other big takeaway of this book is that corporations cannot deal with our being human. it's an intolerable existential threat, a genuine existential menace. unionize starbucks. unionize amazon. destroy the machine. (hide spoiler)]...more
i loved johnson's Pym, didn't quite like Loving Day, appreciated the heck out of this book. i cannot say i loved it because it's a very intellectual bi loved johnson's Pym, didn't quite like Loving Day, appreciated the heck out of this book. i cannot say i loved it because it's a very intellectual book (not difficult, not challenging, just full of ideas baked quite seamlessly inside a funny story) and the thinker in me found itself engaged more than the lover of literature in me. i cannot tell the ideas without spoiling the book but i'll just say that this book, while being fun, engaging, and fast, with a riveting and often hilarious plot, is also a clarion call for political revolution in the age of fascism. mat johnson never mentions fascism in the book (i may be wrong) but what he is describing is the particular brand of fascism that is sadly and tragically thriving in the united states, a fascism dictated by greed, the war on truth, racism and classism, and the cultist seduction of the masses. he describes all of this so lucidly and cleverly, the lover of ideas in me had to stop and think many, many times.
it is particularly clever that the book should be called Invisible Things. there are 'invisible things' in the book, but they are there almost stealthily, as behooves invisible things. johnson does not make a huge big deal about them, at least not until the end. yet they are central. fascism thrives on invisibility and the collective agreement to not see, not notice, not do anything about.
so what i'm gonna say, if somebody asked me What is a good novel about what is happening in the united states now and what to do about it, i'd say, Read this book....more
last night i read a negative review of this book in the Atlantic, and even though i thought the review had no merit it was good to be reminded of enoulast night i read a negative review of this book in the Atlantic, and even though i thought the review had no merit it was good to be reminded of enough of the plot to write my own review. the Atlantic review discusses Candy House in terms of its relation to A Visit from the Goon Squad and since i don't remember a damn thing about Goon Squad this was difficult for me to appreciate, plus like i said, i think the reviewer gets it all wrong. Candy House is about the internet, some five years from now, as a place where privacy is so dead we can upload all of our consciousness to the cloud, thus of course putting in the cloud all the people who ever interacted with us in any way at all. this is the premise. but then jennifer egan does what jennifer egan does, which is tell what amounts to a series of interconnected short stories about the various characters, and in doing this she goes back and forth in time, showing the characters connect, grow, succeed, fail, etc. i do not think that the point of all this is to talk about a dystopian privacy-less future. i think the point is to discuss how the various often monumental changes that occur in technology and culture do little to affect what i will call the human condition i.e. the fact that we are people with complex inner lives and complex stories and rich, deeply textured presences in the world. so for me this book was mostly the story of these people, whom i grew quite fond of, whom i rooted for, whom i felt for.
now the other thing about jennifer egan is that she is an absolutely phenomenal writer. like most of us i read all the time, obviously not only literature but also what my friends write and what my students write and what various people write in articles and on twitter and in magazines, and there is good writing and not so good writing, but jennifer egan is just a cut above. she could tell me the story of just about anybody and i would read it and delight in it immensely. there is a section about a spy that is so intensely brilliant, i had to slow down to do the readerly equivalent of sipping very old whiskey.
so yeah, loved this book, absolutely fucking loved it....more
so hard for me to review this. i have no distance. i love claire and the book moved me deeply. i read it as her personal story of motherhood (which itso hard for me to review this. i have no distance. i love claire and the book moved me deeply. i read it as her personal story of motherhood (which it is) which she was telling personally to me, and writing anything feels like betraying an intimate conversation with a dear friend.
the book is an incredible take on disability and difference. it's an incredible take on many other things too (the heteropatriarchy, conformity, parenting of course, childhood, birds, dogs, nature, etc) but as a disabled and queer person, and a former (current?) owl baby myself, i sucked up claire's view on the scope of love and acceptance. this scope is endless.
"my child is disabled, what should i accommodate?" claire: everything
"but [insert any possible objection]" claire: still everything
"but certainly [insert extreme case scenario]" claire: yup, that too.
this is sci fi heaven. i'm not super into stories right now, meaning plots, with lots of stuff happening, but if you are, yeah, heaven. also the themethis is sci fi heaven. i'm not super into stories right now, meaning plots, with lots of stuff happening, but if you are, yeah, heaven. also the theme of the (white) savior is dealt with with some sensitivity, which is good, i think (there are many other themes! themes galore!). ...more
i am classifying this with speculative and supernatural and some of it indeed is, but keith rosson has a great ability to mix the realistic with the si am classifying this with speculative and supernatural and some of it indeed is, but keith rosson has a great ability to mix the realistic with the supernatural by giving the latter a flavor of the former, and i think he does this by making his characters surprised and skeptical about the supernatural, and forced to embrace it slowly. it's so brilliantly done and also strange enough to keep us off balance, and it's full of heart and feeling. his characters are just about exclusively men (in all of his books), but i don't miss women at all (and this is something, coming from me!). this is gentle and inquisitive masculinity, a look into what makes men broken and also what repairs them, and also a look into what makes communities broken and what repairs them. mercy, indeed.
this particular book -- maybe like all of his -- focuses on a specific cultural violation, and on the toll that needs to be exacted for this violation to be set to right. rosson mixes cultural violations with personal violations to great effect, cuz there is no way, ever, that a cultural-historical violation doesn't transmit to, and gets perpetuated by, individuals. good, good stuff....more
Parts of this book are lovely. Parts, I skimmed. I’m not sure it comes together, but the lovely parts are really lovely, so maybe it’s okay. I’m so haParts of this book are lovely. Parts, I skimmed. I’m not sure it comes together, but the lovely parts are really lovely, so maybe it’s okay. I’m so happy to have learned about bonobos. I think I am in love.
The cover could not have less to do with the book. I have no idea what the publisher was thinking. ...more
the first book of this tetralogy is fantastic. in the following ones there is a lot more of the same, with limited character development for our hero the first book of this tetralogy is fantastic. in the following ones there is a lot more of the same, with limited character development for our hero and story development in general. ultimately, this is action-fueled and techno-terminology-packed storytelling that lacks, it seems to me, much substance. the most enjoyable bit is the smartalecky intelligence of murderbot, who is of course adorable. it's not that i didn't have fun, it's just that it left me wanting more.
while all the non-bot characters are gender-coded, murderbot is not, and when a pronoun needs to be used for murderbot (very infrequently), that pronoun is it. the dumbfounding thing is that at some point along the way murderbot is modified to be able to pass as human, with the obvious implication that it should be read either as gendered or as agendered by other humans. since we never encounter agendered humans, we expect murderbot to be read either as male or as female, for consistency. but the author is careful to avoid genderization of any kind, including of the nonbinary kind. this seems lazy to me, especially because while i was super tempted to code it as female at the beginning (cuz the author is female?), it grew progressively male for me as time passed. i could point out how/why, but i'll just say that i tried super hard to resist its increasing masculinization and couldn't. internalization of the gender binary and expected gender roles on my part? probably.
i adore mensah, as one should, but here's another thing. in spite of all proclamations of respecting murderbot as a fellow person, mensah infantilizes it quite a bit. and, in fact, while murderbot is massively smart and capable, it is also emotionally stunted (it's hard to imagine mensah talking to murderbot in such infantilizing way if murderbot were coded as female, but again, why avoid the topic entirely? what is there to be gained? maybe these reflections?
all of this i would have LOVED to see developed or thematized more explicitly. i don't expect the full-length book to deliver in this respect, but i'll read it anyway....more