theMystery.doc

theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh, 1660 pages.
Long, and maybe intricate, maybe gnarled and knotted, this interwoven serices of narratives, conversations, reports, and transcriptions frequently involve characters named "M," Matt, Matthew, or McIntosh, just like the author. M's father is dying. One character has a beautiful wife, but is having an affair with his neighbor's high-school aged daughter, while he endlessly works on a mysterious book, but he remembers none of this. I found it fun and readable, but endlessly confusing. I have before read 1200 pages of a book and thought "there's only about 450 pages left in this book, I hope I figure out what the book's about soon" (I did not figure it out). Reminiscent of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves if not in style, then at least in it's sense of typographical playfulness, with pages of pictures from old movies and pages of asterisks and other typographical symbols alternately moving the story along and adding to the confusion. Fun to read if you don't mind non-linear,experimental, or just plain odd fiction.

Cane

Cane / Jean Toomer, 245 p.

 A classic of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a wonderfully weird combination of prose, poetry, drama and song, which evokes small-town rural Georgia in the 1920s with a gorgeous vividness.  The writing, in all forms, is sensual - that is, it constructs the setting in a way that incorporates all the senses, almost as if the reader could taste the air. 

Difficult to summarize, the work incorporates the author's experiences as a light-skinned urban northerner who moves to Georgia to teach.  One of the members of our Classics Book Group observed correctly, I think, that the poetry is especially strong, as in "Her Lips Are Copper Wire:"

whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent

Multiple Choice

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, 101 pages.

An interesting literary work whose structure is, according to the notes in the back of the book, "based on the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, which students took in December each year from 1967 through 2003."

Zambra is some sort of gem, turning sections from "Excluded Term," "Sentence Order," "Sentence Elimination," and "Reading Comprehension" into moving and effective stories about family, loss, and the Chilean government.

One of my favorite stories, in the reading comprehension section, titled(?) "Text #3" includes the question:

89. After reading this text, you would rather:
A) Not have read it.
B) Not have children.
C) Have many children.
D) Not have a father.
E) Have a parrot.

So Much for That Winter: Novellas

So Much for That Winter: Novellas by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, 147 pages.
"Minna Needs a Rehearsal Space," and "Days" are presented in different formats. "Minna", the story of a broken romance, is told in short declarative sentences, each no more than one line wrong. "Days" takes the form of a numbered list. Both were good stories, but I Mina go be more compelling.