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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on G. Kirilenko and L. Korshunova's What is Personality? Also going through some Gramsci essays.
I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.
It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.
On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.
Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up. Klara and the Sun is the same. After reading The Remains of the Day, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go I realized that I've seen pretty much all he has to say.
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