{"id":69928,"date":"2021-01-14T15:19:36","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T20:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=69928"},"modified":"2021-01-14T15:41:09","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T20:41:09","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/01\/14\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-13\/","title":{"rendered":"I arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Animalia<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Frank Wynne, translator)<\/p>\n

Brutal and beautiful, Animalia<\/strong> depicts four generations of a farm family in France, and the Faulknerian arc of their fate from agricultural peasants to lower-class pig farmers, from the late 19th<\/sup>– to late 20th<\/sup> centuries. This family saga presents a past that is both unsentimental and unhygienic. The premise book\u2019s premise, humanity = bestiality, is relentlessly catalogued, with illustrative metaphors throughout. The equation only becomes so when love is subtracted from humanity. How loves becomes subtracted is something the novel demonstrates via a family piggery, and the human cost of starting the piggery makes up the first part of the book.<\/p>\n

Del Amo\u2019s prose, in Frank Wynne\u2019s deft translation, focuses on monosyllabic nouns and verbs, rarely adorned by adjectives and adverbs: its sentences punch in rounds of two or three dozen words at a time. The images blend and blur animal and human behaviors, parts, and secretions into a seamless and unseemly whole.<\/p>\n

Jo\u00ebl is one of the sons at the end of the family line. A young man who hates the brutal, degrading work of raising pigs, Jo\u00ebl also resents his brutal, degrading father, and resents feeling guilty for his attraction to men, whom he encounters only in other degrading, unsanitary sites. In the following passage, Jo\u00ebl is shown performing one of his daily duties in the piggery, while thinking about random men and his father:<\/p>\n

\u201cJo\u00ebl shoots back the bolt and steps into the pen. The pigs scurry towards the far railing, leaving one sow that struggles to its feet, then goes over to blend into the herd. A purulent whitish discharge trickles from her vulva, down her hocks, forming a pool on the concrete floor in which the aborted foetuses lie, small sacs of pink, blood-smeared skin with undeveloped limbs, some still encased in the placenta like \u2013 half-hard dicks in latex condoms<\/em> \u2013 formless things, neither human nor animal. . .<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps the father\u2019s contempt for him is merited: Jo\u00ebl has never proved himself to be good at anything and would never have been able to make a life for himself beyond his supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n

The abuse and degradation are shared among the men and women, although the novel focuses more on toxic masculine implosion. If job success requires you to turn off your thoughts and emotions about the animals you, with your own hands, castrate, kill, abort, beat, probe, cage, and have forcibly fucked, it will mark you. And if your family does that job generation after generation, well, something\u2019s gotta give.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Mercy Athena<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Andrea Applebee with illustrations by Lorna McIntosh
\nSylph Editions \/ The Cahiers Series<\/p>\n

Moving to Greece\u2014whose language she barely knows\u2014after the end of a 10-year marriage, Andrea Applebee took little with her other than Mercedes Athena, her seeing-eye dog, which Applebee has become increasingly dependent upon as the degenerative eye disease she and her twin sister were born with reduces her vision to recognizing swaths of color, such as the sky. This graceful essay is coupled with illustrations (i.e., \u201cworks on paper\u201d) by Lorna McIntosh that reflect the essay\u2019s changing moods.<\/p>\n

Applebee learns to navigate a new language, a new physical terrain, and new work, with Mercy as her constant guide and helpmate. They will love and rely each other for 15 or 16 years, and then Applebee\u2019s blindness will compel her into another such relationship. She knows that about their future, but less about her own, except which of her capabilities she\u2019s already demonstrated to herself that she can build upon.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Avian<\/strong>
\nNeel Mukherjee, with paintings by Lu Chao
\nSylph Editions \/ Cahiers Series<\/p>\n

A young girl, immensely intelligent, takes an interest in bird song. By the time she is 21, she has a PhD in neurology and publishes paper after ground-breaking paper on avian communication. At some point, the engrossing hobby has become a career that is engrossing to the point of excluding and neglecting her children and husband. The social services are called in, a divorce follows, her work divorces itself from reality, and her pursuit of understanding communication continues\u2014until, perhaps, she solves the mystery of a children\u2019s story that has haunted her all her life. Lu Chao\u2019s paintings (executed apart from the story) complement the mood of this complex, beautifully rendered tale.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Falstaff: Apotheosis<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Pierre Senges (Jacob Siefring, trans.)
\nSublunary Editions<\/p>\n

A tongue-in-cheek meditation on the significance of Falstaff\u2019s feigned death in Henry IV, Part 1:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cActing as a dead man between two merciless duel scenes . . . provides an occasion for John Falstaff to restore the oft-maligned nap to its former glory: as such, the nap won\u2019t be the overeater\u2019s ignoble cowardice, it will be rife with meaning, it will be heroic. Nap will become stratagem, victory deferred, mockery and diversion, non-violent wisdom, watercolorist\u2019s restraint, dandyish nonchalance, composure of the stoic sage, unmoving harmony with the surrounding landscape, composition and performance combined, silent role bursting through the screen, Eleusinian mystery and Orphic ritual, death\u2019s approach, a motionless danse macbre, a trick played on death itself by adopting all its outward attributes in a parodic mode, but with the highest solemnity\u2014and the mind-boggling marriage of clowncraft and the macabre.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, enjoying Falstaff<\/strong> does not require having read any part of Shakespeare\u2019s Henry IV<\/strong>. What should be enjoyed is Senges\u2019 ability to combine the laudatory with the bathetic to applaud cowardice as moral achievement, simultaneously meaning it and not meaning it. Translator Jacob Siefring has done well at what amounts to alternating a long wink with an arched eyebrow.<\/p>\n

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‘Undula visits the Artists’ from the ‘Book of Idolatry’, Bruno Schulz, 1920-22, 9,8 x 14,5 cm, clich\u00e9-verre<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"Undula<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Bruno Schulz (Frank Garrett, trans.)
\nSublunary Editions<\/p>\n

By weird alignment of the stars, an early story by Bruno Schulz was rediscovered a few years ago\u2014perhaps Schulz\u2019s first published story\u2014but published (a) under a pseudonym in (b) The Journal of Petroleum Officers in Boryslav<\/strong>. \u201cUndula\u201d is an atmospheric sketch, a cross between Poe and the later Decadents, a mournful, dream-like musing over one Undula, a sort of dance-hall entertainer of easy virtue whose pure essence only the narrator sees.<\/p>\n

But decadence requires things go wrong, and they do. The narrator realizes that, despite Undula\u2019s degraded life, to her the narrator is nothing, which the narrator is only too eager to accept as proof of her perfection: \u201cNow it\u2019s time for me to return to the threshing floor from which I had left only an impetuous miscarriage. I shall follow through to the end so as to atone for being my Maker\u2019s mistake.\u201d The rest of the story takes us back to where it begins\u2014in a room, alone, drifting in and out of consciousness, mulling over the homunculus that is his soul.<\/p>\n

Follow the connection between “Undula” and The Book of Idolatry<\/em> in: Buried Treasure: A New Story by Bruno Schulz Unearthed<\/a><\/p>\n

A short lecture on Bruno Schultz by David Grossman:
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