The Amsterdam readfest

Finished Fall on Your Knees on the way to Amsterdam. The commentary was right - I did like it better as it wore on - but still felt that it was wearing on and that I'd got gigged into reading something I wouldn't ordinarily read. But then what was gigging me was the quality of the writing, I suppose, or the book's reputation as a modern Canadian classic, or, I don't know. Perverse voyeurism, maybe? It was gruesome, and I'm sorry, very V.C. Andrews.

The thought occurred to me, when Kathleen's father interrupted her with Rose, that any social conservative readers would have a field day with the fact the main characters' heterosexuality and nuclear famility were so dysfunctional and the girl-on-girl action was so hot. But then social conservatives don't read long novels, besides Gone With the Wind, I suppose, which for what it's worth was way, way better than Fall on Your Knees.

But Dale was right a couple comments back - Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliette) is a fucking awesome play. And the dialogue through Fall on Your Knees is really top-notch, too. That's so hard. Good dialogue.

Anyways, on the way back from Amsterdam I read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. Bruce Chatwin is certainly my favourite travel writer and maybe one of my favourite writers altogether. This book is different from the other ones I've read by him - it has more of the same feeling throughout instead of being a bunch of snippets - somehow there's something more personal about the feeling, if not the stories. That's probably just in my head because I didn't know anything about his life when I read his other books.

But there's something exhausted about the person who listens and writes In Patagonia - something beyond anger, frustration, beyond anything but looking and listening. And that makes the perfect narrator to tell us about a place like Patagonia in the 70's, after the end of the Allende government and in the thick of Isabel Peron's government, yet so far from it all. Big big recommendation.