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This is the only book I have ever read in my life that will give you back something everytime you read it. And though this is not how we normally read it, I think nothing better has been written by a writer about the everyday 'condition' of being a writer! Staggering, singular, and the only 5* review I have given a book in a long long time

@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