Under The Skin(Michel Faber, 2000)
Read in the summer because it inspired Porpentine’s game "Her Car is the Edge of the World".
I was itching to write a gushing review about 2/3rds of the way in and I’m glad I held off because there was admittedly a dip after that. It’s not a long book anyway
My main take is that he spends that first large portion very meticulously setting up this insane concept and getting us all on board with it. At first you really aren’t that on board with it but then you are. It helps that Isserley is so tough and clever for a narrator. And then at that 2/3rds point suddenly it seems we’re mostly up to speed and absolutely gripped and then – where do we go from here? I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think Michel Faber even properly thought of an answer to that. The concept is so good I can forgive a thin plot. And I can’t really see a more satisfying ending to the one I received. So in a sense the dip is not something I’m too bothered about.
Things I enjoyed
----The body horror of 1. the castration/fattening-up/farming of the hitchhikers into meat and 2. the disfigurement and plastic surgery of the aliens to look like “vodzels”. In her short mention of this book Porpentine talked about how she liked the depictions of body dysmorphia and chronic pain. I agree after reading it but didn’t imagine it would go to this level.
----In lots of ways the message and moral undertone is a little heavy-handed but I can forgive that because the overall effect lands well. For example I didn’t like the initial detail of the hitchhiker writing MERCY in the dirt, though it did discomfit me it felt a little too overt. But bringing it back later with Isserley trying to use the word but being unable to pronounce it– I thought that was great.
----Similarly Isserely’s own class-based prejudices and revulsions were interesting but nothing special.
----The descriptions of the Scottish Highlands surprised me with how beautiful they were.
----Despite the abruptness of the ending and the continued evil of the corporation and how part of me lowkey wanted her to blow up the entire farm, I very much enjoyed the sinister detail of the corporation wanting a human woman brought back whole. I like that this wasn’t explained and that by this point Isserley was so distressed she didn’t spare any time in her narration to think about it. Instead we can think and wonder about it ourselves. Big fan of books that give you a little bit of mental homework.
My favourite aspect of the entire book is a structural feature. It’s how whenever Isserley picks someone new up in her car, there’s a moment when she leans back in the seat and then we immediately get a first person jump into the mind of the passenger for a few pages. This was beautifully done. I enjoyed the little segments– he can do other voices very well and to good effect– but what I really liked was how quickly it was established as a structural norm, machine-like. Input of passenger in seat → output of short moment of narrative telepathy. You come to expect it, and you’re delighted when the code works for any variable, not only the hitchhikers. Like Amlis Vess’s thoughts, for instance. In some way I feel it must be why Porpentine could look at this novel and see the possibilities of a game. Just an all-round clever design that worked well and I admired.
Regardless of the slightly disappointing ending this book is overall a thumbs-up because I read it very obsessively over about two days on a pirated iPad pdf. I even read while brushing my teeth and I can’t remember the last time I did that with a novel. It also reminded me that I quite like sci-fi.
W A R N I N G!
i hate goodreads and all its spinoffs so badly i could die, but i still enjoy putting the thoughts of what i loved/what moved me into the ether, and reading the thoughts of others as well. This page is my temporary workaround for the former... as for the latter, who knows.
of course spoilers & talking openly about plot. also the embarrassment of revealing my opinion.
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1930s-50s)
started sleepily during a heatwave post-exams, and finished coolly during an otherwise too-lazy period back home.
I want to come back again and again to talk about these, but right now (too sleepy) I will only list below some of my favourites out of the bunch. I found all of them interesting to some degree but some of them were way out of my depth and I felt I didn’t experience them as deeply much as someone smarter could have. I also want to see if there’s anything similar about what did strike me as great.
In short I entered knowing nothing about JLB and left a big fan. What’s this guy, some kinda genius?! I loved this.
Favourite fictions: “The Garden of Forking Paths”, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (possibly), “The Circular Ruins”, “Funes the Memorious”, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”, “Three Versions of Judas” (audaciously), “The House of Asterion” (the first I’d read from Borges ever, & what spurred me to more), “The Zahir”.
Favourite parables: “Inferno, 1, 32” (the machinery of the world), “Borges and I” (thinking of Bidart), “Everything and Nothing”.
Paradise Lost (John Milton, 1667)
Tortured me nearly to death throughout all of a month and the subsequent springtime. choked and hacked down. i can’t be trusted to say anything about the contents.
even now when i look back on it all i remember are images either gruesome or terrible or so large as to be immobilising (blinding even hahahha). it's like i didn't even read this at all, just had it shot into my eyeballs.
i still love Milton's sonnets but I probably won't return here for at least two decades.
Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, 1996)
Brought this as my only physical book on a short holiday
My third(?) time. I read this by dipping in and out initially just to re-experience my favourite parts but over the course of the trip I re-dipped to the point where I had essentially reread the whole book in fragmented fashion. I feel like this is a great way to reread your favourites.
Someday I will write a lot on what Fight Club truly means to me, but now is not the time. All during M***** I was itching for it. All the time actually. When you love something you see it everywhere and I see Fight Club everywhere. Whenever I am on a plane I melt and swell. Whenever I am in the throes of an all-nighter my reflection is a bruised fruit. Sometimes when I am in a crowded place the world blinks out and I am just a collection of Joe’s body parts surrounded by space monkeys. this is so fucking corny but I love this book so much. Fight Club has wormed its parasitic way into my stupid open heart.
I’ve been thinking over why I feel so strongly about this book. Partly through circumstance: when I first read Fight Club I was in a new place in a new country, during a time in which my future was undecided and I was neurotically stressed out. I was whack crazy regarding my body, and for the first time in my life I was beginning to experience bad sleep and having sleep be something I struggled with rather than did. I still fight sleep. Also I felt purposeless and coglike. I was searching for outlets in poserism and online shopping. and maybe most importantly I was being mentally tormented by this girl I was nearly obsessed with who was somehow like a parallel-universe version of me. So the book mattered. In that respect. But more importantly, though less easily explained, reading Fight Club felt like I was listening to a voice I didn’t know I had. The way he writes, it’s like the same cadence of my internal monologue. From the beginning I felt so comfortable with that. So in that sense, maybe the content didn’t matter. I could have been reading whatever, furniture catalogues or romance fantasy, as long as it was in that tone. I get that a little in other Palahniuk, that similar tone of voice, but I think his masterpiece is this book. When I read it, the mental voice I’m conjuring is my own.Extended self-centred thoughts
The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
Read during the hottest part of summer, finished the night before one of the best days of my life.
Goes without saying that this is an all-timer and made me feel terrible, really sick at heart. something I’ll revisit and think about repeatedly. It was so good it pissed me off. I felt seduced by its tricks despite being aware it was tricking me, and towards the end I was only able to read it in the middle of the night in this illicit riveted embarrassed way, normally used for trashy romance and gratuitous horror.
I’ve thought on this book after reading but not in any organised fashion
The whole setting just enthralls me. Hampden and its surroundings and inhabitants are more alien than genuine dragons-and-magic fantasy realms. Part of this is because of how white everything is, but I expected that of Donna Tartt, and this all-white upper-class Vermont college is far more believable and easier to swallow than the all-white New York of The Goldfinch.
About a quarter through I had this unserious facetious idea that it was a book about how terrible it feels to try and break into an existing friend group. Now that I have finished I pretty much stand by that idea. To me Richard’s entire experience can be summed up by how fucking terrible it feels to break into an existing friend group who all have prior dynamics you aren’t privy to and years of history together that you don’t know anything about. I found both his sycophantic glazing of the Greek students and his not-so-subtle attempts to heighten his standing in the narrative very embarrassing and sadly pretty relatable. A memorable moment is when he stands beside Bunny and the twins in the library before being accepted into the group, and in order to look busy opens a book and reads a list to do with the word “secondary”. I think that “secondary” sums it up pretty well.
Bunch of reviews appear to dislike the second half & the funeral because they think it drags, is boring, nothing happens. stupid.... Bunny’s funeral is one of the funniest sections of the whole book and in fact only the latter portion actually started making me laugh but whatever. Plenty happens, only it’s less pleasant and aesthetically pleasing (as is Bunny) so they don’t like it. To be honest, by then I liked it so much that I didn’t mind lingering.
The dream-scene at the end really hit it for me (on the verge of feeling super bad through the last hundred pages and then that scene activated the badness).just the most horrible ending vignette I can possibly think of. how little they actually knew about the Greeks despite everything.
On that note my opinions on the characters are still confused and liable to change but I’ve decided on one, which is that I hate Julian viciously. somehow more than the actual murderers, though i don't know what that says about me... isolated and groomed all those students, & only one out of everyone (I think) who got to experience the classical world and escape scot-free. Though now that I think about it, I don’t think he ever really made any attempt to experience it at all.