I have had a very long day, but it involved cats, useful conversation, and dinner for the second night in a row with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B., although not the terrible movie we keep planning to watch.
1. My gift package from Zingerman's arrived, meaning that the kitchen now contains: garum colatura di alici, moutarde violette, fennel paté, half a pound of pecorino romano, half a pound of goat's milk gouda, and baobab jelly. So far I have tasted only the last two items (not together—although, as I write it out, it's tempting) and they are delicious. Some of these I am looking forward to cooking with. Some are just going to vanish very rapidly. Thank you,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee!
2. While on various forms of public transit this morning and evening, I read Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter (1953). It's great. The language is dense and poetic, changing tense and perspective mid-sentence if it needs to; the story is so many seamless parts fairy tale, murder ballad, melodrama, and social message that it feels like its own independent genre of Southern Gothic. It does a great child's voice and a great serial killer's. It's not supernatural, it's mythic. Laughton's film is a startlingly faithful version. There are some differences in the ending that I recall, and the character of murderous, self-styled "Preacher" Harry Powell gets a sexiness upgrade of several hundred percent when played by heavy-lidded Robert Mitchum, but there are entire passages that I recognized at once on the page, dialogue and visual allusions included. I'm glad it's been reprinted; I have the impression it's been neglected in favor of the movie, which itself was rehabilitated only relatively recently. If I say it reminded me of both Caitlín R. Kiernan and Henry Roth, I don't know if that helps anyone except me.
3. Matthew Timmins has self-published his first novel, The Miseries of Mr. Sparrows. I read this book in draft form in 2012 and loved it at once. I wrote at the time:
It's a hard book to synopsize, not because nothing that happens in it matters, but because so much of what happens in it matters on a level that is barely perceptible to its harried protagonist. Late in the year 1869 of a Victorian century that somewhat resembles our own, or perhaps early in the same 1870—the calendar is not the only bewildered authority in this story—the task of delivering a mysterious box to its equally murky owner devolves on Robin Sparrows, the long-suffering clerk of the wickedest law firm in Claudon. He is supposed to return it to a prisoner by the apt name of Tarnish, the man who over twenty years ago embroiled Albion in the disastrous Crocodile War and broke it from an imperial power to something the sun is quite definitely setting on. It is a story known by every schoolchild in Albion, the shame and tragedy of the Empire; it is these bright painted colors of heroes and villains and patriotism and myth that Robin finds himself raking up and reevaluating as he traces the ghosts of the Crocodile War from Minister's Tower to the slums of Scurwell—and he scarcely has time to notice, overtaken as he is by misadventure after misadventure as he tries gamely and rather hopelessly to fulfill his commission. It's very funny, with a strong component of the absurd and the grotesque; it can shift gears instantly into real, three-dimensional consequences or poignancy and even now and then a touch of the numinous. The city is a character. So are the islands of Crocodon. The elevator pitch would probably be, "A bit like Bleak House if one of the original Jarndyces had started the Trojan War. Also, Kafka." And although the book is titled after Robin, it cannot help but feel significant that the one character who really understood everything that happened those long, legend-burnished years ago is the person with whom Robin cannot communicate at all.
So, a baroquely written, tragicomic, alt-Victorian (but not steampunk!) semi-mystery which works some clever undercutting of colonialism and imperialism while reading like Charles Dickens and Mervyn Peake. At present it exists only in e-book form, but I hope for a print copy someday. Check it out!
rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B., although not the terrible movie we keep planning to watch.1. My gift package from Zingerman's arrived, meaning that the kitchen now contains: garum colatura di alici, moutarde violette, fennel paté, half a pound of pecorino romano, half a pound of goat's milk gouda, and baobab jelly. So far I have tasted only the last two items (not together—although, as I write it out, it's tempting) and they are delicious. Some of these I am looking forward to cooking with. Some are just going to vanish very rapidly. Thank you,
yhlee!2. While on various forms of public transit this morning and evening, I read Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter (1953). It's great. The language is dense and poetic, changing tense and perspective mid-sentence if it needs to; the story is so many seamless parts fairy tale, murder ballad, melodrama, and social message that it feels like its own independent genre of Southern Gothic. It does a great child's voice and a great serial killer's. It's not supernatural, it's mythic. Laughton's film is a startlingly faithful version. There are some differences in the ending that I recall, and the character of murderous, self-styled "Preacher" Harry Powell gets a sexiness upgrade of several hundred percent when played by heavy-lidded Robert Mitchum, but there are entire passages that I recognized at once on the page, dialogue and visual allusions included. I'm glad it's been reprinted; I have the impression it's been neglected in favor of the movie, which itself was rehabilitated only relatively recently. If I say it reminded me of both Caitlín R. Kiernan and Henry Roth, I don't know if that helps anyone except me.
3. Matthew Timmins has self-published his first novel, The Miseries of Mr. Sparrows. I read this book in draft form in 2012 and loved it at once. I wrote at the time:
It's a hard book to synopsize, not because nothing that happens in it matters, but because so much of what happens in it matters on a level that is barely perceptible to its harried protagonist. Late in the year 1869 of a Victorian century that somewhat resembles our own, or perhaps early in the same 1870—the calendar is not the only bewildered authority in this story—the task of delivering a mysterious box to its equally murky owner devolves on Robin Sparrows, the long-suffering clerk of the wickedest law firm in Claudon. He is supposed to return it to a prisoner by the apt name of Tarnish, the man who over twenty years ago embroiled Albion in the disastrous Crocodile War and broke it from an imperial power to something the sun is quite definitely setting on. It is a story known by every schoolchild in Albion, the shame and tragedy of the Empire; it is these bright painted colors of heroes and villains and patriotism and myth that Robin finds himself raking up and reevaluating as he traces the ghosts of the Crocodile War from Minister's Tower to the slums of Scurwell—and he scarcely has time to notice, overtaken as he is by misadventure after misadventure as he tries gamely and rather hopelessly to fulfill his commission. It's very funny, with a strong component of the absurd and the grotesque; it can shift gears instantly into real, three-dimensional consequences or poignancy and even now and then a touch of the numinous. The city is a character. So are the islands of Crocodon. The elevator pitch would probably be, "A bit like Bleak House if one of the original Jarndyces had started the Trojan War. Also, Kafka." And although the book is titled after Robin, it cannot help but feel significant that the one character who really understood everything that happened those long, legend-burnished years ago is the person with whom Robin cannot communicate at all.
So, a baroquely written, tragicomic, alt-Victorian (but not steampunk!) semi-mystery which works some clever undercutting of colonialism and imperialism while reading like Charles Dickens and Mervyn Peake. At present it exists only in e-book form, but I hope for a print copy someday. Check it out!
