Mariel's Reviews > War & War

Moon, valley, dew, death. Hypnotism, spell, candle, book. War, peace, fight, talk. I have no idea what I am talking about.

"And this condition, said Korin, for someone like him, who saw clearly that this tragic turn of events was not the product of supernatural agency, not of divine judgement, but of the actions of a peculiarly horrible heterogeneous bunch of people , there was nothing left to do than to use the rest of his speech to lay the most terrible, most incurable curse on them."

"Let the world be cursed, he declared, choking, a world in which there is neither Omnipotence nor Last Judgement, where curses, and any who pronounced them, were held up to ridicule, where glory could only be bought with trash."

I am cursed. Korin is cursed. I had a "Well, that leaves me out" moment when reading War and War. I had more than one of those moments. I don't want to admit on goodreads which those were. This book reminded me to feel self conscious about admitting that kind of thing (again). Curses, swears, names in vein (oops vain). Korin is cursed too. He goes on and on, a sort of railing against the established wall of collective not giving a shit at the same time he doesn't notice the back that's turned to him (turned against its own wall. Gotta be). This back is literal and figurative. (I was shocked when he noticed his "listener" fell asleep during his demonstrations.) Would he notice it if it were staring him in the face? (He might notice that the face was pleasing to him.) Cursed, cursed, cursed. And it moved me because I feel it too. It's a prayer (and that swear) for the feeling moved and not knowing why. A movement to want to share it and it all gets lost in translation. I was reminded a lot of when I was a teenager and lived in rural Florida towns. I saw a whole lot what I began to refer to as "evil little kid translators". The brats took awful advantage of the fact that their foreigner parents didn't know English. They had a kind of mixture of anger at having to be the representative and another scornful eye on what they could get out of it. Communication woes. This shit again, Mariel?

I really want to describe the prose, those paragraph long sentences, those after the facts and are they really the facts obsessions as like a stop motion animation. (Sometimes the recurring movements seeped into me. I would be reading in my car during my work lunch breaks and I'd find myself going to open my arms wide for some kind of back up emphasis. Or reaching for something. Or hands going through my hair when I was confused. That happened a lot.)

What book would I share if I would upload a book onto the internet? This is the new Fahrenheit 451 question. Instead of reciting it you talk and and talk and talk about how it moved you and you hope that the back will turn around. (And hope that you'll notice if it doesn't. That was painful.)

I loved this book and yet it made me feel so anxious. It probably wasn't a good idea to read it when too predisposed to feeling threadless. Sometimes a song lyric can feel prophetic and I feel like it could have something to do with anything that has anything to do with me. Other times? Not so much. Would it be too weird to say that War and War felt like a bit of both? I only hope it'll shade in for me as I can take it with me... Right now I feel kind of cursed, too.

"What this meant was that the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, because such was the nature of things."

War and war and war and war and war. Keep thinking about it, Mariel. I've been thinking for weeks about Korin feeling like he was on to something and the more he tried to pin it the more he was cursed to not notice anything himself. I don't want to be like that. László Krasznahorkai, I will listen. I will give you that much. (You can try to take over my expressions.)

I can't wait to read Satanstango (I've been watching the movie. Watching the movements isn't the same as moving them in your head, I don't think. Because I'm blind!).