Shawn Huelle

Thoughts on 5 of the books I read in 2014

  1. Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän by Max Frisch
    I wish I had written this book: Small chunks of text, lists, images, repetition, and in the end, there is a landslide, but not the one you expect. I wish I had written this book, but I didn’t, so I wrote about it instead.

  2. HHhH by Laurent Binet
    Another book I kind of wish I had written: A strange mixture of fact and fiction and meta-versions of both in small, relatively easily digestible bits all of which work together to prove that David Shields (see also) read the signs all wrong: It's not reality we want—it's fiction (or it's fantastic reality, which is also fiction). It's strange: I don't remember many details of the story, but I remember the book. I remember being intrigued by it more than liking it. I remember thinking that intrigued by might be more important than liking.

  3. Violenzia by Richard Sala
    I read Violenzia at least twice last year. I also read Sala's work Super Enigmatix (link) as it was posted this last year. Both Violenzia and Super Enigmatix (as characters) are agents of chaos, not unlike the Joker in the Batman universe, but there's something about a) the "flatness" of Sala's drawing, b) the sureness of his lines, and c) his color palette which makes his chaos more insidious. In fact, those three things work together to create an almost Lynchian effect: The innocent, colorful, flat world you (think you) know is seething underneath.

  4. The Robber by Robert Walser
    I read The Robber as research for an article I wrote for 3am Magazine, but didn't discuss it in that article. In an oeuvre spectacularly concerned with walking, this book feels as though it has given up the physical act of walking for a more fervent intellectual version—walking in tight mental circles. So much of what I've read of Walser just begs for a biographical reading, and all I want is to reject that impulse. Very nearly every sentence in Walser's final (known) novel is itself a novel.

Often the inflexible bends in its secret interior, and it is the rule of the immobile to invoke a longing, a motion, and it moves in its circle and comes over to look at him yet cannot catch a glimpse of him, but at least it's made the effort. Those who perambulate take on a task for those unable to do so, and it is always the stony that one seeks to soften and the soft degenerates into stone.

  1. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
    I had a number of lengthy discussions with two friends who also loved this book. My position is that, although the book reports (on) emotion, it is itself not emotional. That is not a value judgment. This is yet another book I wish I had written. More than HHhH, it is making a gesture toward David Markson's work which I find well nigh irresistible. I think I read Markson, Perec's Life A User's Manual and parts of Tristram Shandy for the first time all within the same 9-month period and was infected by the idea that everything is composed of parts and that the connective tissues between those parts can be left out and the "story" will still make sense (or even more sense(s)). While reading Bluets, I also made the following playlist of songs mentioned (obliquely or directly) in the book:
  • "Let X=X" — Laurie Anderson
  • "Mood Indigo" — Duke Ellington
  • "I Get A Kick Out Of You" — Ella Fitzgerald
  • "Pirate Jny" — Nina Simone
  • "River" — Joni Mitchell
  • "Famous Blue Raincoat" — Leonard Cohen
  • "Blue" — Lucinda Williams
  • "Lady Sings the Blues" (1956 Studio Version) — Billie Holiday
  • "Red Dirt Girl" — Emmylou Harris