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@sophiemng7 Oh god yes I need to read full surrogacy now. I am gonna add it right away

A beautiful little book, and shows Anita Desai's extraordinary grasp on the literary sentence! The description of post-Independence Indian households in which the second-person narrator's mother lived so evocative and delicately written. In way of shortcoming: the reader does not trust this interest in the 'stranger' and here the length works against the novel. More could have been said about what the draw of this stranger figure was! I won't spoil it but the ending was a little bit of a non-ending also

I wanted to read Kaplan for a while and L'excès-l'usine didn't disappoint. Leslie Kaplan worked in a factory for two years during the May 68 events. Here describing the factory, Kaplan transcends genre, as Blanchot also affirms by questioning whether it should rather be called poetry or more-than-poetry.

@rulapeep haha a fine reading!

Early modernists are just built different, the sheer range and scope of the archival work. I understood less the emphasis on particular officials and the way those appeared as the dramatis personnae of the book, and also the overall argument was a little too nimble-footed, but overall this was a really top notch piece of scholarship

Finally found a copy! 🎉

@Lian eager to read the draft of this friendship paper!

@wet_owl I could not get along with this. Did you like it?

The first novel in over twenty years from the now 87-year old Anita Desai!

That was a rousing read, of the best kind! It was especially astute on the paradox that the reasons writers and artists are able to speak back to power of this kind is because they are so precarious already that they have the least to lose. A passage begins referring to Anna Burns's Booker acceptance speech, in which she thanked her food bank. Passages critiquing American liberal intelligentsia and liberal journalism felt so important. This is a genuinely important book for the moment!

@svm Omg! I wrote one of my B.A. term papers on this; I had forgotten about it

Marie-Hélène Lafon's style is dense, a jungle to plough through. A story reminiscent of those told by Annie Ernaux, Didier Éribon and Édouard Louis; Lafon's novel is more descriptive and somewhat flat. Its flowery prose is revealing of Claire's inner world but I missed more introspection, typical of the novels of Éribon, Ernaux and Louis. The last fifty pages are the best because more depth is given to the character of the father, but why I wonder? The book is after all about Claire... why not learn more about Claire?