Anti-Climacus

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Thanksgiving Edition:

Javier Cercas, The Tenant and The Motive: The Tenant is an academic's worst nightmare, though a bit flubbed in the last ten pages. The Motive is Therese Raquin plus Cortazar's short story "The Continuity of Parks," but I daresay better than both. Unlike Raquin, it does not have pages of amateur psychological speculation that takes away from the narrative. Unlike "The Continuity of Parks," it's more than three pages.

China Mieville, The City and the City: I've never met a book more perfectly intended for a politics and literature course.

James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain: Quite excellent in a number of respects: it's a sympathetically-written account of pentecostal religion by someone who is clearly no longer pentecostal (having attended a number of those services, I can attest to its general veracity when in the church). Moreover, I think it's a well-written account of Christianity in general, in which churches are not populated by people striving for moral perfection and judging others for falling short, but are the places to go after having already fallen short. The historical dimensions of the story are illuminating in that they help to close the gap in collective consciousness between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Emile Zola, The Ladies Paradise: 150 pages to go. Report when done.

Bolaño, The Third Reich: In the last few days I've come to speculate that the central board game and the character who becomes obsessed with it are not about either the game or the character, but Bolaño's attempt, through metaphor, to come to understand the people who were really of interest to him: the German generals and soldiers in World War II, particularly those who stuck it out until the bitter end. This reading would be of a piece with his general interest in the motivation of those who knowingly or not-quite-knowingly align themselves with evil, and it would go a long way towards making sense of Benno von Archimboldi's Nazi soldier past in 2666. Good thing I'm writing a paper about that.