for pressing clothes. a romantic bygone of laundry days. old sad irons, box irons, etc. what are they good for now? – gone all cold, all rust. improvised bludgeoning weapon, maybe; bookend like atlas, immovable doorstop, paperweight, printer’s baren… but they’re magnetic to me.
in handwriting spirits live forever. this book shows the reader how to listen to the voices of the dead, & send messages to the future… it puts you in their shoes… scribes & secretaries have poured so much power & intention into it, writing carefully & writing well.
she was a danish salonist & lady of letters, b. 1775 – d.1829 but obviously the real star of the show is this marbled cover.
original novel by lina wolff came out in Swedish in 2019. creepily, its title was “köttets tid” ie the time of the flesh or the time of the meat — tid being Swedish for time. lovely.
so much dark stuff in this: an old man with dementia, whose young & devoted wife refuses give up on his care, his quality of life… a young man who confesses to having cheated on his wife. (like, so much cheating.) a reality TV show that exists only on the fringes of the internet. (i’m sure you’re already imagining how dangerous that could be.) a sort of? accidental murder while on holiday. a series of strangely justified mercy killings. the spanish civil war. a charming butcher-nun of tiny stature with a thrilling backstory <3
CARNALITY = horror story perfection, equal parts psychological + body horror
nightmarish tableaus. scorchingly vivid images, stuff that burns itself into the mental retinas. (the abattoir…! — but i won’t say more.) stunning-beautiful prose, on all the themes: animal cruelty, maternal love, moral uncertainty. but always beautiful. artistic. original prose. the kind of sentences and descriptions that feed the soul.
this is the real literature, yo. it did everything for me. so complex. unsettling. enthralling. for comparison lina wolff is a lot like, and probably good as, ottessa moshfegh. xxx bookworm
a persian horror movie with the soul of a western. perfection. instantly fell hopelessly and forever in love with its vampire, she haunts my dreams (her enormous eyes)
in belgium there are flea markets where you can go scooping up memories, just like this, there are piles and piles of postcards, mountains of postcards, faded photographs on one side and the other covered in scrawling lines of fabulous ink, probably exquisite sentences in French, the flowing hand immaculate and ornate, good god, the whole place is haunted in a way i’ve never seen. in a manner totally unlike
xxx bookworm
b. 1852 & dies in 1895 when he goes down with his ship the elbe: there are about 300-400 souls aboard, and only 22 survive. goessel, kansas is later named after him. it is a small town, pop. less than a thousand, its cemetery full of german mennonites. my antecedents on my father’s side. to see one’s own name over and over on countless crumbling, mossy tombstones in the middle of the prairie… clocks stopped running there a long time ago
oghi wakes up in a hospital, unable to move or speak. his mother-in-law is the only family he has left. his life is changed forever – now he’s reliant on her care. and she has reason to resent him.
hye-young pyun writes so fucking beautifully. the intensity of her details. the unfolding of successive secrets — the way layers of the story keep peeling back & peeling back. shit, she keeps you in SUCH a state of painful, squirmy suspense. her dark imagination is everything. this book is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING.
xxx bookworm
not my favorite ottessa moshfegh novel as it turns out, but man, what a wild, fucked-up ride… there were all these bizarre surprises. some were real gross, real creepy. and ultimately there was true magic in it. just didn’t see that coming. damn. O.M. is an ORIGINAL-ASS WRITER.
xxx bookworm
