M.I. Gelb

Not to be melodramatic but it is a genuine tragedy that this book is not a classic of both modernist and lesbian literature. Yes it was only printed in 560 copies but Emily Dickinson was printed in none copies so that's not a fully sufficient reason. But really Barney and her circle of pre-WW2 feminist lesbians has been pretty erased historically despite their prominence at the time, which again is something of a travesty. Well, we can undo that so read this dang book.

Anyways, this is an absolutely extraordinary novel. It is a poetic, misty, painful, remarkably beautiful piece of writing that is distinctly modernist, certainly, but also should probably be considered a late Symbolist novel more than anything. Barney's style is so poetic and amorphous, blending together poetry, narrative, and leaps of mystical philosophy, that it feels like a predecessor to Clarice Lispector and Ingeborg Bachman which, if you know me, is a massive complement. It is also refreshing reading something from this period that is profoundly, openly, passionately queer, genderweird, plural, and polyamorous, without any plausible deniability such as a vestigial male love interest.

This book is many things. It is a prose poem about life, death, and love. It is an exploration of the internally fractured identity and its complex relationship with the body that still marks queerness. It is a passionate argument for feminist queer polyamory. And it is also, at its roots, a bittersweet story about the way death and the past are constant specters for queer people in a way they aren't for straights. A remarkable piece of work, please read it if you are invested at all in classic queer fiction.

A wonderful, strange little book, a presentation of the memoir as a ghost story. Beautiful, cryptic, and emotionally complex all as it is haunting and unsettling. Really cool, I almost wish it was longer!

This tiny little tragedy is an interesting piece in Schwob's oeuvre, as it's quite difficult for me not to read it as both a coda and rejoinder to The Book of Monelle, especially given Schwob was reportedly very frustrated at being primary known as the author of the latter. Like Monelle, this is a bleak, polyvocal tale of metaphysical child suffering. Here, though, it's vastly more nihilist. No longer do children, in their innocence and ephemeralness, exist to teach lessons or remind adults of something or bring other children to safety. Instead they exist purely as strange, innocent beings with terrible, senseless fates at the hands of adults and the uncaring cruelty of nature/G-d. Schwob mentions on the first page the disgust at people who cut up kids and put them on display to provoke sympathy and that absolutely is something I read as a critique of his own writing.

Also, interestingly, Schwob was (as far as I know) an assimilated Jew and there's a funny dynamic here where he has a sort of fascinated outsider perspective on both Christianity and Islam, but Judaism is completely missing.

All-in-all, a book that's very slight and thus doesn't have a huge impact, but which is a well-wrought tragedy and is particularly of interest for folks who care about Schwob as a writer writ large.

Note: This book is as weird about Islam and "the east" as you'd expect a book from a European about the crusades with white as the primary symbol to be.

The postmodern/experimental detective stori is kind of its own form with a pretty distinct history, stretching from weird fiction and Agatha Christie through Paul Auster and Twin Peaks to the present day. Well, this might be the best entry in this subgenre I've read. Vacated Landscape is a novel that I can best describe as "impressive," as the degree to which it pulls everything off really blows me away.

Firstly, the structure of this book is really interesting, Gormley is spot-on when he describes it as both a mobius strip and a fractal. The themes and narrative style of the novel echo through doublings and scalings-up-and-down. It feels as if you can look at the story from any level and angle and find that interpretation reflected infinitely through the rest of the story. Adding to this is Lahougue's excellent prose, which is both evocative and very funny, as our narrator hems and haws and writes incredibly convoluted sentences that read like a parody of Proust. Which, of course, reflect the larger structure of the novel.

Secondly, this book feels like it has a much deeper engagement with themes of reading, writing, and desire than similar works. The protagonist is an editor (of children's books) and this mean that the novel is less about what it means to write and more about what it means to edit, to seek to perfect a narrative, and so on. So many of the doublings and reflections in this book are through varying levels of incompleteness - such as two identical houses, one of which is ruined, or miniature reproductions of paintings displayed in another city. Through this we're given this really ambivalent, complicated meditation on how you can engage with incompleteness and perfection, narrativization and humanity. In fact, one of the more mundane readings of this book is that it's essentially about a man ruining his life because of his inability to think of people as people instead of as characters that point to a higher truth.

That brings me to the thing that really surprised me and is one of the elements that pushes it to five stars: it's a lot less weird about women than most stories of this sort. Very common in postmodernism, especially of the mystery kind, is the child-woman or madonna-whore sort of character. A woman who, in her womanly naivete, her sexuality, her innocence, whatever, is a lead into a truth that the male protagonist with all his cultural baggage can't access by himself. As I said in my review of Book of Illusions: the idea that women are a sort of lever to help men get their lives together. In this book it feels like Lahougue tackles this mindset quite directly. The second half of the book is highly concerned with the protagonist's love affair with an odd woman. However, instead of her helping him access something he can't, it all falls apart at the attempt. The narrator tries to get all the mysteries and fears of the story to coalesce in the identity of his girlfriend and the result is that it ruins their relationship as he becomes more and more obsessed with the answers she represents, instead of the person she is. It's cool and very refreshing.

And, as icing on the cake, the ending is absolutely killer - another thing this genre tends to struggle with. This book blew me away and I really hope more Lahougue makes it to English.

my current primary project is an experimental horror novella called In The Abattoir. It is a weird fiction-type story that slowly spins out and dissolves, piling in a multitude of identities, narrators, and styles. It is about meat and blood and memory. Trauma and the utter inability to arrange your life in a way that makes sense. It concerns a man who arrives to stay at a very strange hostel. Or perhaps a woman who does the same. A man haunted by the ghost of his twin or of his own self or of something else entirely. A world sacrificing everything to the blood and guts that flow underneath it all.

Some primary influences would include:
- Jose Donoso - The Obscene Bird of the Night
- Samuel Beckett - The Unnamable
- Robert Aickman - The Hostel
- Susan Taubes - To America and Back in a Coffin
- Jean Ray - Malpertuis
- Marcel Schwob - The Book of Monelle
- Unica Zurn - The Trumpets of Jericho
- Edith Wharton - Kerfol
- Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
- Maggie Siebert - Bonding
- Clive Barker - Books of Blood

I hate to be disappointed by this collection, but I really am. The first story is absolutely devastating, an ideal example of how to write dreamy semi-surreal fiction with huge emotional heft. The rest of this book (five more stories and two essays) have their moments but largely lean way too far into sentimentality, self-aggrandizement, and vague misogynistic tedium. A lot of comparisons to Calvino, Borges, and Proust come through and I don't wish to be unnecessarily mean, but a lot of time these writings feel like the work of those three with insight replaced by sentimentality.

- Requiem For Bread: This piece brings this book up a whole star-rating by itself. It is beautiful and emotional, but with a soft hand that never overplays itself. 5+/5
- An Archbishop's Flight: Nostalgia that isn't really up to anything but has some pleasant images. 2/5
- Cherepish: A story that feels pretty heavy-handed in its turn to tragedy at the end, but I appreciate the slowly developing pace and the general conceit. 3/5
- In the Horse's Eye: A particularly Borgesian story in both its interest in language and its weirdness around indigeneity. I like the way he ties the conceptual into the emotional here. 4/5
- The Palace of Emptiness: Both boring and misogynist, like the least interesting parts of the decadent movement. 1/5
- The Cathedral of Mist: Quite pretty and with some vaguely interesting thematic content, but ultimately still a bit too gauzey and nostalgic for my taste. 3/5
- Reading: Every day I am more convinced we need to stop letting writers write about reading and writing. Tedious, smug, and, outside a few moments, almost entirely lacking in insight. 1/5
- Writing: Better than reading as it feels like Willems has actual thoughts here, though I don't find them terribly interesting for the most part. 2/5

its pretty funny that every time Andre Breton encountered something he liked he'd be like "this is the best thing anyone has written since Maldoror!"

It's always refreshing to read weird fiction that's truly WEIRD, as opposed to just about strange things happening. Jean Ray's major novel delivers a particularly strange haunted house story, one that increases in surrealism and metaphysics until it ends up taking apart the whole genre and rebuilding it into something else. Ray's language is also wonderful, coating the house in dripping shadows and flickering lights, and his agility of tone between parody, disorientation, and genuinely scary stuff is really impressive. An absolute banger, though probably not for everyone.

what if my project for the rest of the year was just collecting/reading as many wakefield press books as i can

The Book of Monelle engages a lot with the kind of stuff i tend to complain about in surrealist and proto-surrealist texts, in terms of the idealization of an innocent woman as this sort of grand philosophical muse and symbol, but the thing is it delves so deeply into some of the thoughts around this that it ends up feeling like a metaphysics of suffering girlhood, a symbolic system where the core is that young women suffer and the rest of society dwells on their backs. and while there's plenty of feminist analysis to bring to that, it's a lot more *interesting* than most things in this dimension and a lot more generative for me to think about. according the afterword Schwob was someone who collaged a lot and reinterpreted texts and that's also very interesting to me