pickInsane. So Bolaño
Trying to read at the beach, but the wind has a different plan. 🌬️🌬️🌬️
so-soThis book wasn‘t for me and had it been any longer (it‘s not even 100p), I would‘ve DNF. I‘m sure this is me & not the book, after all it was on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize so I‘m sure there‘s something I don‘t see
3 men have travelled to island to go fishing & then it expands into a story of some of the islanders. Then someone dies & they may come back at ghosts, but since they were just introduced, I didn‘t really care
pickHallucinatory fishing trip in rural Argentina. Male friendship, trauma, guilt, myth, grief, belonging and other, violence. Cinematic imagery: fire, huge stingray, dance dissolved to fighting. Dreams of the Drowner. Sparse, intense translation by Annie McDermott. 2024
47 “It wasn‘t a ray. It was that ray.”
79 “Every morning, since the girls died, he wakes up convinced he‘s going to hear that Siomara‘s set herself on fire. He‘s sure she‘ll do it.”
pickSet against the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Desnoes's MC is a petite bourgeois whose furniture shop was nationalised during the revolution, who lives off his compensatory income, and who by turns supports and hates the social changes with a mix of disdain, arrogance, timidity and self-loathing. He's also misogynistic, sexually objectifies women and is completely self-centred. Desnoes is certainly making a socio-political comment, ⬇️
"Parquear la tiñosa: park the buzzard; leave an unsolved problem in someone else's hands."
I like this Cuban saying, and will be looking for an opportunity to tell somebody they can't park their buzzard with me! ??
"At the moment the U.S. embargo is effectively cutting off communication with Cuba."
- Introduction by Jack Gelba (March 1967)
"All those who loved me and kept bothering me right up to the last minute have left now."
- Edmundo Desnoes
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
"I'm all screwed up because I've looked into things more than is good for my own health; don't know why the hell I read so much. That's why I'm here all paralysed." ???
I haven't read a Cuban author yet, so though I'd remedy that with this recent acquisition #Cuba 🇨🇺
Written in 1967 and set at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the blurb on this 1971 edition says it's written in the form of the diary of a Havana businessman trying (and apparently failing) to come to terms with the political turmoil of his times.
Pretty short - 128 pages - sounds good🤞
pickA short book with a message, but what message? Three men have a drunken vacation on an island they have had a troubled history with, and touch on the sore tensions of the also drunken locals. I was thinking colonialism, but the Argentinian author says it‘s an attack on conservative “neo-liberals”. Whatever it is, it‘s entangled within in an interesting way and open to interpretation. Lots to think about after only 2.5 hrs of reading.
