![]() ![]() ![]() There’s not much plot here, but somehow the voice Moshfegh has created is compelling enough to make you miss your subway stop-I did, twice-or, if you do take this novel to the beach, keep you resting and relaxing and turning pages obsessively until you’re burned to an absolute crisp. Like many of us, she thinks her life would be vastly improved if she could manage to chemically hibernate for a year. ![]() Even when she poops on the floor of an art gallery. It’s narrated by an arrogant, beautiful (we are constantly reminded) woman who is traditionally “unlikeable,” but is so completely out there that you can’t help but be charmed and delighted by her on every glorious deadpan page. ![]() Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin Press, July 10)įirst things first: this book is very, very good. Finally, so as not to go too far off the rails, all of the books below were published this year, or will be published this summer (I wouldn’t leave those late vacationers hanging). No snobbery is meant this list is for people who want recommendations for recent books that will be engaging and exciting and readable on vacation but which have more literary value than the typical “beach read.” What does that mean, exactly? It’s like any kind of art-I know it when I see it. Luckily, there is a middle ground: great books with distinctive literary and artistic value that are also fit for the beach.īy the way: people on the internet love to caterwaul about the injustice of lists like this-the snobbery of suggesting there’s anything wrong with a regular beach read! The reverse snobbery of talking about how boring literary novels can be! The general insufficiency of book lists of any kind! Honestly, I am. As someone who has a hard time investing in a book if it doesn’t at least tick off a few literary boxes, I tend not to have much tolerance for the purely fun and easy-but I don’t want to bring Proust to the beach either. the poet Johan Bernard Schepers (1857-1935), shows how Kalma, although undoubtedly the most radically Frisian oriented author of the two, certainly was not the only, nor the first representative of this new literary discourse.It’s already July, which means that by now you’ve probably gotten a million and one recommendations about which books you should bring to the beach (or lake or woods or park or air conditioned bedroom) this summer. But summer book recommendations in the literary and general fiction space tend to fall into two categories: Fun Easy Beach Reads!!!! and well, everything else. Juxtaposing Kalma with one of his contemporaries, i.e. The transition from a largely pseudo-oral, popular, and colloquial literature to a more intricate, personalized, highbrow literature was facilitated by broader societal developments, like the growth of the participation of the middle classes in civil society and public life, the rise of average educational levels and the subsequent growth of literacy not only in Dutch but also in Frisian. In this article his success is put into perspective by mapping the most salient changes in the practice of writing Frisian literature in the period. Mostly due to his own avant-garde rhetoric, Kalma’s role has been exaggerated largely. Frisian literature increasingly detached itself from the Dutch literary field, a development which literary historians generally attribute to the efforts of the young Frisian writer Douwe Kalma (1896-1953) and the members of his Young Frisian Community (Jong-Fryske Mienskip) (1915). Abstract The decades shortly after 1900 were pivotal in the development of an (more or less) autonomous Frisian literary field. ![]()
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