Your Name
One of the reasons I revisited If On a Winter's Night a Traveler recently was that I was keen to read the recently-published novel Your Name Here – by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff – which I'd gathered was somewhat similarly self-referential. I finished the latter on Thursday having liked it much less than Calvino's book. Its opening chapters irritated me enough that I strongly considered abandoning the thing within the first hundred pages. On page 18, for example: “you are still trapped in a pastiche of the ultimately unsatisfactory If on a winter's night a traveler…” while I was feeling significantly more dissatisfied with the book in hand. As it happened, I had a cold, and was having some difficulty sleeping, so ended up mechanically plodding through long sections of it while sleepless and unwell. I finished it on Thursday. It didn't all strike me as equally bad, and, to be fair, it does also contain less dismissive references to Calvino; but it's not a book I'll be recommending to anyone, and my copy will be appearing at a nearby charity shop in the near future.
I understand that Your Name Here took shape about twenty years ago, failing to find a publisher willing to accommodate its eccentricities at the time. One thing it does very well is to embody and exemplify the early-to-mid-'00s more convincingly than anything else I've ever read. It positively reeks of the interval between 9/11 and the financial crisis of '08. While this is impressive in its own way, it did very little to assuage my negative feelings about the text as a whole. To enjoy it, one would have to appreciate the contribution of Ilya Gridneff significantly better than I did. Apparently, Gridneff was, when it was written, a globetrotting tabloid journalist whose freewheeling stream-of-consciousness emails (examples of which are scattered throughout the book) evidently impressed DeWitt no end: she often states as much and has some of the characters in the book agree with her. Meanwhile I found them irritating and tedious. It’s a tricksy mess of a novel that left me altogether dissatisfied.
Also finished this week: Saltwater Mansions by David Whitehouse, a non-fiction story about the author's fascination with the enigma of a woman's disappearance from the titular address – an apartment-building in the seaside town of Margate. Whitehouse recounts what little anyone knows about the vanished woman's life, interpolating stories about various people he meets along his way to a partial resolution of the mystery. It's a work that seemed to me to fall a little short of its potential, but even so I found it a good read overall: one which held my interest throughout. And, barely an hour ago, I got to the end of A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck. A blurb on the back of the calls it “a perfect blend of science fiction, theology and horror”. I wouldn't go that far. It's a well put-together novella that I suspect would have had more impact had I not already dwelt so much on the subject of horror infiniti.
Making a cup of herbal tea last Tuesday something went wrong within my ten-year-old kettle that led to the house's main trip-switch leaving me in the dark. A tentative second attempt in another outlet brought about the same outcome. This had been an inexpensive temperature-control kettle. Seeking a replacement I bought a less inexpensive one with the same feature: the Sage Smart Kettle™. Fortunately its 'smartness' is strictly limited to having a few buttons to set the temperature: it doesn't connect to the internet; nor does it allow voice operation via Alexa, or her ilk – unlike other kettles I could mention.