Highsmith, Patricia: The Boy Who Followed Ripley
Ripley acquires a son of sorts, a stripling who has just committed his first murder. Ripley, who has murdered a few times by this point in his life, attempts to show the lad how one moves on from these little unpleasantnesses, but things do not end well—though they do end—for the young killer. Ripley fails as a father figure and returns to his sybaritic and undeniably pleasant life with the beautiful, undemanding, and not at all moralistic Heliose. And we’re happy that the pathological Mr. Ripley is able to do so.
Highsmith, Patricia: Ripley's Game
I’m of an age to remember when existentialism was a thing. Not only was every undergraduate with any intellectual pretensions at all happy to think of him or herself as an existentialist (without, you know, actually reading Being and Nothingness); every writer aspiring to create literature did his or her best to create characters in the throes of existential dilemmas. Patricia Highsmith was no exception, even in this, the third Ripley outing, published in 1974 when existentialism wasn’t quite as hot as it had been. We see an ordinary man, manipulated by Ripley, to be sure, but also making choices, choices that involve this good bourgeois with murder and the mafia. We watch him, in short, “break bad,” and when one considers that one reason (but not the only reason) he does so is that he’s dying of leukemia and would like to leave some money for his wife and son we can only wonder how much Highsmith influenced that seminal TV show.
Highsmith, Patricia: Ripley Under Ground
Highsmith continues her investigation of the self, how it is constructed, and the lengths to which one might go to defend it in this outing which finds Tom Ripley a comfortable family man with a wealthy wife. We watch Tom present himself as a painter who is dead, but whose forged paintings continue to sell. We watch the forger fall apart, ruined by having allowed his work—his identity—to be superseded by the work of the dead painter he so much admires. We watch as Highsmith lays it all before us with her characteristic cold perfection, and are satisfied.
Highsmith, Patricia: The Talented Mr. Ripley
I think it’s time to take a deep dive into the icy cold world of Patricia Highsmith, starting with the first of the Ripley novels. It’s a tale of identity theft avant l’internet, a time when, if you stole someone’s identity, you’d probably have to kill him, and maybe a few bystanders, too. Ripley does, and feels no guilt to speak of. Highsmith remains aloof, neither judging him nor making him likable. Her prose is cool and exquisite. Maybe that’s why Gore Vidal calls her a modernist?
Cusk, Rachel: Transit: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 2)
A real estate agent, a contractor, a writer, a student, an Albanian builder, an old lover: These are just some of the people who the Rachel Cusk-like protagonist talks with in Transit, a novel, like its predecessor in the trilogy, made of conversations. As in the first volume, the conversations she reports on shed light, obliquely, on the reticent narrator, and also touch on a variety of philosophical issues ("fate" takes center stage) with a similar lack of sledge-hammer bluntness.
Mandel, Emily St. John: Station Eleven
This is a book with elements of science fiction that is absolutely realistic. Some of it chronicles a pandemic and its aftermath; the pandemic is the “Georgian Flu,” and the aftermath is the end of civilization as we know it. But Station 11 is not one of those tiresome surviving the apocalypse novels, not least because central characters, believing that “survival is not enough,” are keeping Shakespeare and symphonic music alive, but also because there are other threads to this novel that take place pre-apocalypse. The threads are woven together with such subtlety that one never marvels at how Mandel manages to keep all the balls in the air until later. Likewise, just as the theater and music that are central to the novel are essentially communal, so one would be hard-pressed to identify the novel’s main character, or even the novel’s central conflict. All of it is just mesmerizing.
Shakespeare, William: Henry VIII (Folger Shakespeare Library)
This seems to me the weakest of the Shakespeare plays named for a king. Perhaps that’s why it’s not usually included when one speaks of the history plays. There’s lots of pomp, though: a trial, a coronation, a royal birth, all with their attendant festivities. Too bad about the Globe burning down after a cannon fired during one performance set the roof on fire.
French, Tana: The Searcher: A Novel
I liked this novel as much as I did Tana French’s last one, The Witch Elm, and I liked both a lot. It’s set in the Wild West of Ireland, a region we experience through the eyes of her protagonist, an ex-cop who hails from North Carolina by way of Chicago. He’s an outsider who, as readers will expect, gets drawn into the dark bog underlying the village to which he’s relocated, and in her quiet way—more a matter of mood and atmosphere than action—French makes every page compelling. I guess I’m a Tara French fan.
William Shakespeare: Richard III (Folger Shakespeare Library)
A play about a hateful deformed tyrant from the past read today calls to mind the hateful deformed tyrant so prominent now.
Tesson, Sylvain: The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga
Sylvain Tesson is an eminent and prolific French travel writer. In The Consolations of the Forest he writes about what happens when he stops traveling to spend six months in a remote cabin on the shores of Lake Baikal. He gets occasional visitors, but for the most part he is alone with nature and his thoughts, and records both in a daily journal of his time on the lake. That he is kept company by cigars, vodka, and an eclectic library make his journal entries more seductive than they would have been if he had fallen prey to the spiritual claptrap that drives some anchorites to become hermits or that those anchorites succumb to when alone with their thoughts but lack booze, books, and tobacco.
I actually don't think books ever went away. Of course there were more book / magazine / newspaper readers back when there was basically no alternative, but even with alternatives text-based media still does well. Probably some of the people you see staring at screens are reading books. That is they are readers for whom, I would guess, like most of us, the text is the thing. The vehicle--print or pixels--is unimportant.
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 10/26/2013 at 09:22 AM