Welcome to Litsy!

There‘s way more politics than I felt like reading about; and the prose is so filled with unrecognizable references and annoyingly difficult trains of thought that it was tough to just settle in and enjoy the non-story, the retrospection and lack of narrative.

Herbert writes with this brand of hypersexualized machismo that I‘m not a particular fan of.

Thank God it‘s a short novel.

Regaining your senses means your demons have returned to their place. They can‘t torment anyone any longer. Except you.

What did I just read?
This book was too weird for me. I don‘t like books that “inhabit the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay” with the author as a character in their own novel. I love novels, I love memoirs, and I prefer them to be distinct. This book was translated by Christina MacSweeney, who also translated Luiselli‘s The Story of My Teeth—which was also too weird for me.
#tournamentofbooks #tobsummerreading #intranslation

Reading this book for my book club felt like a grim arm wrestling match I was determined to win. It is decidedly masculine and so far outside of my comfort zone that I cannot even say whether I recommend it or not.

This book is a prime example of why I don‘t really like memoirs or autobiographical novels. Way to much self-reflection, analysis, and meandering away from the main point. The strongest parts of the novel focused on the main plot, in which a man sits at his mother‘s sick bed as she dies of cancer, remembering his childhood as the son of a prostitute in Mexico. Some strong writing in parts, but overall a struggle for me. #tob #translatedbooks

Time for lunch, and time to start a new book! #tob #summerreadingchallenge

This is an autobiographical novel with several meta insights into the challenges of writing an autobiographical novel. I loved much of it, but it feels like the sort of book you should read in one sitting to really be swept up in the feverish prose. Unfortunately, because of well, life, I wasn‘t able to read it that way. Breaking it up the way I did seems to have broken the spell for me, and I had a hard time diving back in after I put it down.

Picked up the early-June #tournamentofbooks #summerreadingchallenge —it had a queue! Now I need to squeeze this is too! #tob

A mother lies dying in a hospital, her son Julián Herbert is at her side. When she is asleep he feverishly writes in his notebook. About growing up as the son of a prostitute, about poverty and violence in his Mexico, about drugs and trips abroad, about his pregnant wife. It‘s a chaos in his head, sometimes hard to follow and hard to relate to. In the mean time his mother lays there. Great writing, but all in all a so-so read for me.

#ToB

Starting this one for The Morning News Tournament of Books Summer Reading Challenge. It goes head to head with Tayari Jones‘s An American Marriage in June.