Díaz’s narrator writes in a kind of Spanglish which is mostly English but the Spanish isn’t italicized to mark it as such, so the mixed language all flows together. It’s a only slight departure from the way mixed texts are usually treated, but it makes a big difference. There might be little nuances you’d miss without a foundation in Spanish, but you can definitely glean the meanings.

In some ways the book is incredibly political, as the family’s curse is tied directly to Trujillo’a reign, with sometimes lengthy footnotes filled with horrific stories. But the narrator has such a breezy voice that it never gets bogged down. There is ultimately a lot of sadness in this story, yet it’s carried off by an impressive cloud of hope.

There are a few chapters that seem to depart from the regular narrator, which is intriguing. It seems like a lot of books I’ve been reading lately have interesting narrative perspectives. Like Auster’s trilogy and my current read, Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This one too shifts in different directions in a few chapters in a manner that made me feel almost like I was reading a work in progress (as the narrator mentions doing a lot of research and then there are chapters not from his point of view), or maybe it’s just a record of the a story being slowly built over many years. That other level of consciousness (not just what we are being told straight-out, but what we can infer between the lines) does impart a certain energy to the book.

I have the Penguin Classics edition with cover art by Art Spiegelman and a foreword by Luc Sante. Sante discusses the importance of absent texts — as he phrases it, “Fates pivot on these unread texts” — but what’s so compelling about them is the books themselves are texts written by characters (rather than an omniscient narrator). So there are just layers upon layers in the stories both in the ways the different narratives are mind-bogglingly pieced together and the manner the narratives are told, as well as the manner in which parts aren’t told.

POEM AFTER RECEIVING VOICEMAIL FROM YOU AFTER (I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE) HOW LONG!

Your voice and the weighted
stammering between us
evident
and the train of my routine
adjustment to nothing anywhere
as unforgettable
as your bare feet on the flagstone
pathway
next to bunched up honeysuckle
blooming aromatic in the a.m.
of a daily life
we shared but never dared
to lock and key
into
our problematic/
intersection—
That train derailed/my
regular defenses failed
to lower the volume
of the million and one
or zero
meanings
of your call

Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man’s bloodshot eye.

I was surprised by how experimental this narrative feels overall, with some incredibly surreal sections and others entirely decked out in layers of metaphors. Though it is an entirely critical look at race in the mid-nineteenth century, spanning over many different arenas to portray just how pervasive problems are in the culture of the United States, the language and atmosphere of the story is often quite beautiful. This is the sort of book that makes me wish I was studying literature, to spend some time reading lit theory and exploring the depths of the story. While an ever-recurring feeling of hopes dashed threads throughout, I found something uplifting about the brutal truth of it all or perhaps the fact that these truths were told against the odds.

Invisible Man was the only novel published by Ellison in his lifetime. Thanks to John F. Callahan, his literary executor, a bit of his second (2,000-page) manuscript was published as Juneteenth in 1999. A fuller version of that manuscript (also edited by Callahan) will be published by Random House this summer as Three Days Before the Shooting.

I think this is one of my favorites:

Small Murders

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon’s neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife’s grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy’s cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.

You can listen to Nezhukumatathil read this one on From the Fishouse (though I’m not so into her reading of this).

There’s something in the way Gomez has written this book that kept eliciting these knee-jerk, argumentative responses, and I’d find myself angrily relating some piece of what I read nearly every day that I was reading this book. I suppose even from the title, it’s apparent that he’s taking an incredibly provocative stance. The crux of his thesis is an analogy between music and books, and he aims to prove that books will inevitably follow music into the purely digital world. The comparison doesn’t sit so cleanly with me — recorded music is so different from books. Music existed for thousands of years before recorded music was invented. Yet books are so unto themselves. I find it unlikely in some apocalyptic scenario where books and digital gadgets were gone (and only real-time oral presentations were available for storytelling) that we would continue to see such complex narrative works.

While Gomez disclaims at the beginning that he’s not looking at how any of this will affect libraries and universities, that he’s looking primarily at adult trade publishing, I don’t think the debate can really exclude any of that. He might call that “bloat,” but I think those are key parts of the industry, almost more than adult trade publishing. I’m still concerned about how a push towards digital reading will impact educational communities that don’t have the financial ability to stay on top of potentially expensive technologies.

All that said, I do think at some point the right ebook reader will come along, and we’ll see a lot more books in electronic form. Right about now, I could do with an easy search function for this book — too bad Print is Dead isn’t on Google Books. But I don’t really agree with Gomez that printing companies will instantly go out of business (what about printers that print things other than books?), and books will instantly become just nostalgic collectors items. I don’t think publishers are “irresponsible” for not pursuing electronic books more aggressively, since they did on the first push, but the technology wasn’t there yet. And it’s still not quite there. Books and print are still very alive.

Unless kids today seriously cannot take to reading books, in which case I don’t think just books will die, but novels and the types of works that are too tied to the book format themselves.

In this novel, the ladies are incredibly privileged and attempt to abandon their lives, but not in any sense that they own up to their privilege. Miss Goering seems to think she will achieve sainthood through following her whims to sell her house and live in the country, to move in with a man who calls himself a “bum,” to then follow the next guy who pays her any mind. Mrs Copperfield goes to Panama with her husband and becomes attached to a prostitute. It seems like there is a lot of sexual aspects that are only vaguely implied. The GLBTQ encyclopedia says:

Bowles’s family and her lover, Helvetia Perkins, rejected her first novel, Two Serious Ladies, as too obviously lesbian, but despite recognition that the novel’s main theme is women’s sexuality, the novel’s lesbian content has yet to be seriously considered.

I read this out of Bowles’ collected works, which includes an introduction by Truman Capote. He mentions how she speaks several languages fluently and “perhaps this is why the dialogue of her stories sounds, or sounds to me, as though it has been translated into English from some delightful combination of other tongues.” The GLBTQ entry also mention this “curiously formal yet mocking” speech. It definitely lends a certain atmosphere to the story.

While I can’t say that I enjoyed this very much as I was reading it, I feel like I appreciate it more now that I’ve finished. It’s always strange when that happens.

The story is all third person but alternates between the points of view of a four family members, each of whom is in the midst of their own (up until now) private crisis. It reads quick because the chapters are so short and lead into each other, almost J.K.-Rowling-style. What I liked about it was how a lot of the interwoven stories involve miscommunication, so one chapter will have a character realizing or deciding on something only to find another character reveal something in the following chapter that will foreshadow an impending conflict.

Maybe it was that one gory chapter that I couldn’t even read that spoiled it for me. I carried a certain level of anxiety that there would be some kind of reprise for the rest of the book. Needless to say, I probably wouldn’t have read the book if it had come with this cover or one involving of these drawings by Haddon.

Both of these books obviously have really creative, interesting designs since Kidd did them himself (well, the cover design is credited to Bulbous Medulla — with artwork by Charles Burns and lettering by Chris Ware — but I think The Cheese Monkeys said the same thing? It was in his book of book design). The stories themselves involve lots of pre-computer design nostalgia, not to mention general 1950/60s nostalgia through specific brands of products that are mentioned. But while the first one is full of quirky, funny situations that are kind of fantastic in a “life isn’t really that interesting” sort of way, this one attempts to pair the quirky, funny stuff with some existential angst — the combination doesn’t always mesh.

Additionally Kidd is sometimes very explanatory about technical design concepts and other times not. So people who don’t know a lot about design will sometimes not get things and people who do know a lot about design might feel annoyed that he’s explaining so much. I can’t remember if that was similar in The Cheese Monkeys, but then I knew less when I read that one.

I imagine I’ll hold onto these books just because they are so attractive and at some point I will read them again. But there isn’t anything so astounding about the stories, which I guess means that form triumphs over content in these books.

While the title translates as “Hello, Sadness,” it is itself the French translation of the Billie Holiday song “Good Morning, Heartache.”

For whatever reason the second section, covering “From the Garden to the Wild” kept making me doze off on the train. Maybe I was just really tired or something, but those chapters all felt a little too academic and detailed, especially the entire chapter about William Wordsworth (who was an important walker no doubt), but so many quotes of his poetry? Were they really all necessary? I kept skipping around looking for something to latch onto before finally jumping ahead to the next section, “Lives of the Streets,” which looks at urban walking in cities after the Industrial Revolution. Maybe I can relate more to the story of De Quincey’s time wandering London where Solnit says at one part, “Streets were already a place for those who had no place, a site to measure sorrow and loneliness in the length of walks.”

The kind of beautiful thing about this book is that it manages to be very broad in scope while keeping a steady pace (save, perhaps only for my taste, the section “From the Garden to the Wild”) — if I tried to touch on everything this book covers, it would turn into a big boring list. It’s the sort of book you can only really get by reading it.

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude—a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one’s solitude is geographical—one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This unchartered identity with its illimitable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emancipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer’s state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.

Anyhow, there’s a vast array of books from handmade artist books to more industrially produced books. It is a little hard to look at a book of books and not be able to open them and look inside, but even in the photos it’s apparent how worn and fragile many of them are.

Russian avant-garde encompasses several distinct (yet often overlapping) movements, of which constructivism is perhaps my favorite. So I found myself drawn books from Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. The photomontages in particular reminded me of several by Martha Rosler in the WACK! exhibit of feminist art from 1965–1980 at PS1. We couldn’t help but comment how Photoshop has changed that arena forever. For some reason I love old photomontages, perhaps knowing how much harder it was to make them look really nice without the fancy software we have today.

Overall this is a nice book to spend some time with. Of course if you want to visit with the one at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the NYPL, you might want to get there before things disappear to who knows where when it merges into the research library (the one with the lions) sometime in the as-yet-undisclosed future.