Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1976

I somehow missed the Hrabal. Magnificent. It's still Ondaatje though.

idk i've had discussions with a lot of men who think it's brave to hate joan didion who think speedboat is worthless '70s ruling class ennui or something but i think it's basically a sick collection of keenly observed microfiction/nonfiction

I don't know how The Stone Book works without the other three parts of The Stone Book Quartet but I am voting for it anyway.

Bear is an excellent book, and it got my vote. I wrote something about it a while ago for a friend's project...

"What struck me about Engel's work this time around was that if we consider the bear an archive, then the book can be considered an argument for a return to or reinvention of the archive as a sensual sphere. The archive heaves and licks and commits frottage with us, or it wants to, but habit, fear, and social custom often prevent us from engaging with the archive in this way. Often, this is for good reason— becoming intimate with the archive's deepest layers is dangerous, after all, as we can become lost in it, and what if we find ourselves in a location where searching for a way out is not pleasant, or is actively harmful? (I think here of medievalists who become sympathetic to odd white supremacist notions, for example, or the reification of patriarchal structures of knowledge that comes with so much mainstream poetry study, as another). That Bear can be read as a story of a woman determining what the archive is for herself, and deciding how deeply she desires to engage with it, is what makes Engel's work so alluring. The archive (in the form of the bear) makes its mark on Lou, as if it wants to prove itself not a trifle to be tamed, and this is a way of showing the violence inhered in all sensual relations— that Lou is terrified yet accepting of this violence is one of the more interesting things about the book, and is the issue I'm left pondering when I'm finished."

(Yes, I've been trained as an academic lol)

The thing that I found off-putting about Bear when I discovered it (I think it was only last year or the one before when I first read about it) is that while everybody talks about it as a book about the central character exploring her own sexual autonomy and freedoms and dangers, all I could think about is that chaining up a bear and having sex with it is deeply abusive to the animal, and why is this book not held up as being about humanity's awful cruelty? Maybe the bear works as a metaphor but not an actual bear? Maybe the book does address this?

Genuinely would like to know answers to these questions, as someone who hasn't read it I'm not holding fast to any opinion I've already formed or anything. I think it's partly because I do want to read it but I worry that I won't be able to get over that issue to think about anything else the book wants to show me.

The bear isn't chained up, from my recollection. If anything, it seems that Lou and the Bear have a mutual attraction to each other, which...you know, that poses its own issues, but the Bear definitely comes and goes as it pleases.

It's also worth noting that there is a lot of First Nations context for some of what happens in the novel (Google "Haida Bear Mother," for example).

Ah. I think I might have read a snippet from early on, when she first gets there, b/c I had a strong memory of reading a bit where he's described as chained.

Hadn't thought about the First Nations aspect, that is interesting.

You know what? I believe the Bear was a pet, actually— so it *was* chained. But Lou *unchains* the Bear as she learns from a local First Nations woman how to form a bond with it. It's been a few years, tho, so my memory is a little cloudy.

I assigned it to a class once. They all thought it was incredibly strange but loved it, and some of them were militant vegans.

Speedboat or The Easter Parade

idk i've had discussions with a lot of men who think it's brave to hate joan didion who think speedboat is worthless '70s ruling class ennui or something but i think it's basically a sick collection of keenly observed microfiction/nonfiction

How many of them have even read it.

Oops meant to put that in block quotes.

Coming Through Slaughter is the only novel about a musician I've come across that really seems to have learned from music, that moves through short chapters of of layered, developmental momentum and tensions (thinking of counterpoint, b and c melodies, syncopation, vamping) surfacing and rolling along some more to, through and past the end (as some records keep you listening past the fade, like where are they going, what will happen down the line, or is this just hemidemisemiquavers of the insatiably impressionable audience mind, just not accepting the finality, but if so what's wrong with that) And it's not an affect the author could soak up from playing the subject's records over and over, because Buddy Bolden.
Patternmaster is also good and inimitable and Octavia E. Butler, not Olivia (but yeah you're better off considering that series as a whole, same as, on a lower level, with Children of Dune.) I liked Triton very much. Did not know that Melvin Van Pebbles wrote a novel, will have to check.

A woman in film school the year ahead of me had actually started filming an adaptation of Bear, but I can't find any mention of it online now.

everyone i follow online loves speedboat, but i haven't read it yet. not a great dune, not a great robbins iirc

woman on the edge of time is really quite arresting, but voting crews

i think i want to vote for Kiss of the Spiderwoman

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Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1977