Odd and End Readings

Okay, I have collected some material since I left the motel which have not been included here. May you find them interesting.

Items from The Guardian (I cannot find time to read the books at home, I have to read reviews!): Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act and ‘Six spellbinding and thought-provoking novels’: why we chose the Women’s prize for fiction shortlist; and film directors whose movies I've not seen (High-minded, progressive and literate, Laurent Cantet made a trio of brilliant films.

From The Boston Review, I found Junot Diaz's review of The Ghost of Gabriel García Márquez: On the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s posthumously published novel, Until August. Marquez awes me, and I thoroughly enjoy what I have read of Diaz. A sampling of passages follows:

If you read it super generously or are a García Márquez stan, Until August won’t trouble you. The book is brief and there are occasional flashes of the wit that helped rewrite world literature—“She subjected him to the deadly technique of not taking him seriously”—and for some the simple pleasure of García Márquez’s voice, no matter how attenuated, might be enough.

Myself, I found the book trying—precisely because of its slightness. There just is not a lot there. Wisdom, doubt, complexity, human warmth, magic—all in short supply. People, too. Ana says about her different lovers “she knew him as if she always had” and “she knew him by then as if she had always lived with him.” If only the reader were so unlucky. The book’s characters are described but never deeply engaged with, never brought close. Ana suffers the most from this remote approach; we know she reads, we know she dances, we know she loves her husband, we know a bunch of stuff, but it’s all information, stays in the head, none of it passes into the heart or imagination, none of becomes real or true.

*** 

If the Until August affair teaches us anything, it is that whether we’re Gabriel García Márquez or Fulano de Tal, we are all unfinished business. Which is to say that neoliberal capital will never be finished with us; nothing will stop it from extracting labor from us—not life, not death.

Even in a book as forgettable as this, García Márquez is still offering us prophetic insights, but perhaps not precisely in the manner he anticipated or wished

I did not know Canada had a carbon tax - Pierre Poilievre Wants a Carbon Tax Election - and it seems Canadian Conservatives are as easily startled and dim as American conservatives:

You have to give Conservatives credit for transforming the most boring subject on earth into a compelling election issue. They’ve drawn attention away from the glaring void where a Conservative climate policy should be while turning roughly half the electorate against a policy most barely comprehend.

 And here I leave you.

sch 4/30