Anti-Climacus

The Ladies' Paradise: The first Zola I've read where no one commits suicide at the end (depending on how you interpret The Dream, I suppose) and all the better for it. It recounts a lightly fictionalized version of the rise of the department store in Paris through the eyes of a young female sales clerk. I couldn't help but make two comparisons to Balzac, both of which I think are flattering: though the novel tends to include a lot of factual information about how department stores rose to prominence (techniques of advertising, staging of retail displays, the commission system for salespeople), it avoids the problem of Lost Illusions in which that novel simply dumps the needed information 30 pages at a time--Zola parcels out the information as needed to drive the narrative along. I also think its depiction of feminine virtue is a lot more subtle than, say, Eugenie Grandet. The main character, Denise, is given principles she sticks to, but also gets to have doubts about them, and have her fate be unclear until the end. It's not a simple "behave properly and the world will be at your feet" story. I've also been thinking of Denise as a character in light of the criticism over the character of Madeleine in The Marriage Plot, but this is already pretty long, so it'll have to wait.

The Skating Rink: As it happens, my best friend from high school is also a political theorist who also happens to like Roberto Bolaño. I suspect we are actually uncanny doppelgangers from a Kafka or Borges short story (this feeling is heightened given that we used to be confused for one another quite frequently, even though I'm about six inches taller, and I had long hair while he was voluntarily bald for most of high school). Alt-Nick and I were in agreement that this one is slight in comparison to his other works. Oddly, the thing it reminded me of the most was Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis, which uses Bolaño's real-life experience as a night watchman at a campground on the Costa Brava to great effect.