luch finished reading Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
From the Publisher:
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home …
Another queer, neurodivergent, anarchist trans femme on the world wide web
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luch has read 0 of 5 books.
From the Publisher:
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home …
This gave me some Big Feels.
It's been a few years since I was on a big trans lit kick (Nevada, He Mele A Hilo, The Masker, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a few others I can't recall the exact titles for rn), and I think I forgot what it feels like to feel queer resonance with a work.
The romance here, the descriptions of emotions, touches and responses to touch, intimacy, sex… there were many moments that I read through a film of tears. It felt Good.
But as the book wore on, some of the cracks around the edges started to feel more Significant. In particular, the politics of this world rang hollow for me, to the point of taking away from the rest of the plot some. It is extremely painful for me to watch queerness become deradicalised and more domesticated—more acceptable to cishet, patriarchal, Liberal …
This gave me some Big Feels.
It's been a few years since I was on a big trans lit kick (Nevada, He Mele A Hilo, The Masker, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a few others I can't recall the exact titles for rn), and I think I forgot what it feels like to feel queer resonance with a work.
The romance here, the descriptions of emotions, touches and responses to touch, intimacy, sex… there were many moments that I read through a film of tears. It felt Good.
But as the book wore on, some of the cracks around the edges started to feel more Significant. In particular, the politics of this world rang hollow for me, to the point of taking away from the rest of the plot some. It is extremely painful for me to watch queerness become deradicalised and more domesticated—more acceptable to cishet, patriarchal, Liberal society. To become a "Blue State" thing. I think this book wants to be radical, but it ends up feeling like a performance of radical politics to me by the end, rather than imagining a fundamental shift to how we live, relate, share, exchange, and—yes—fuck. And I think that lack of fundamental reimagining bleeds into the rest of the text in places, and… I dunno. This kind of thing is Important to me, so it was tough when it fell short. It just felt… very NYC at times.
I'll write a more detailed review in a reply to this review if anyone's interested in particular criticisms; I wanted to keep this spoiler-free.
In any case, fucking good feels when they hit. Pretty interesting scifi or whatever kinds of elements. The pacing was solid, it moved along and kept me reading. It breezed along, was full of beautiful snapshots and gut punch emotional moments, and it was good to read a text with a lot of happy queers—even in hard times. It just… has some weird shit going on that I couldn't ignore.
Whew, got some mixed feels here. Some profoundly good ones, and some less great ones. I'll have to decide whether to do a spoiler-filled review or (more likely) a separate comment with fleshed-out, spoilery thoughts. Stay tuned.
This was the first book I picked up this year. I think about it all the time, and it's one that I expect I shall revisit. There's a lot going on here: individual and familial conflict and splintering in loss; some of the potential effects of choosing an active, militant, radical, underground life; the close, easy bonds between people and the "natural" world we inhabit, and the ways that these are distorted and ruptured by contemporary social structures; and on.
I think that any radical—especially those interested in animal liberation—should pick this up, at the very least for the lens it offers. But I also think that those who aren't radical will find insights here to hold on to—and may come to understand some pieces of what move the rest of us.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. …
**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of …
From the Publisher:
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home …