I selected The Body Snatcher to read last Sunday after I finished The Barefoot Woman because I was planning, this past week, to participate in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge and I suspected this might limit my mid-week reading time. (It did: on top of the 1000, I did morning pages every day. I saved my evenings for proper writing, and with working, preparing meals, and trying to do yoga now and then, it left not a lot of time for daily reading.) The Body Snatcher is a Brazilian crime novel, of which one blurb said, "You won't put it down until the very last page." Somehow I thought that was the kind of book I needed to be reading while I was also trying to write. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. The book is set in Corumbá, in the interior of Brazil – practically in Bolivia. The narrator is a scumbag who's relocated there to get his life together after things fell apart for him in São Paolo. This starts off as one of those stories where the central character makes one bad decision after another and you just know things are going to go from bad to worse. The narrator, as I said, is a scumbag – he deserves all the bad things that come his way, and worse! But he's the one telling you the story and somehow he managed to attract my sympathy. (The best comparison I can think of is Martin Amis's The Information, which I read so long ago I barely remember it, but I loved it and its dirtbag narrator at the time, though I'm not sure I still would today.) As things got darker and darker through the first half of the book, I found myself not wanting to read it because I was sure the bad news would just keep coming. The chapters were very short, but every one seemed to bring a new, worse development. However, the book was divided into two parts, and things took an unexpected turn in part two. Yesterday, I had the afternoon off (summer Fridays!) and I sat down and read the second half straight through. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I think it does benefit from dedicated reading rather than occasional browsing.
Poetics of Work was the last book we selected to read for my Baltimore-based friends' book club before the book club fell apart. So, I had ordered the book thinking I would read it a few months ago, but as our meeting never got scheduled I shelved it. When I was going through my shelves and pulling out all the unread books by women in translation, I decided to add it to my small to-read stack. It's very short – just over 100 pages long – and quick to read, but I don't feel like I absorbed much while reading it. (Maybe "quick to read" is not how it should be read.) The story is narrated by an out-of-work poet who has anxiety about looking for work, but also anxiety about finding it. She is in constant conversation with her absent father, whom she frequently describes as her superego. Her mother is also absent – dead, in fact – but has a more passive role in the book. The narrator writes about the rise in militarism and fascism in the present day, in the wake of terrorist attacks in France. There is some very interesting language play, but not enough story to keep my interest. Reading this made me feel a bit dense. Then again, I have never had much patience for poetry; maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I do wish I had a book club to talk about it with. I might get more out of it in conversation, or I might find out that my lackluster feelings about it weren't just me.
