From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Laura Kelber]

Love the Strugatskys and Lem (has anyone seen the wonderful film adaptation
of his The Futurological Congress - The Congress (2013)?). This
Toddler-Hunting story sounds like it's exactly what I'm avoiding. Ugh!

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 4:45 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Strugatsky Brothers hell yeah! Last year I raced through Hard to be a God
> in the grip of a flu fever and it was one of the better reading experiences
> of the year.
> Also this year I read Taeko Kono's Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories
> (trans. Lucy North) and it was comparable to discovering Pynchon for the
> first time. I now judge all other writing in relation to that book.
> The title story focuses on a woman, a fading opera singer, who hates little
> girls but buys expensive outfits for little boys so she can watch them
> dress and undress. She also has sexual fantasies about beating them until
> their intestines fall out. It's profoundly unsettling, but like all of her
> protagonists the character is both alien and deeply comprehensible. The
> rest of the stories similarly mash raw and sometimes shocking psychosexual
> drama with domestic normalcy. I can't recommend them enough.
>
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 6:37 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Stanislaw Lem.
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:06 PM Thomas Eckhardt <
> > thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Especially "dreary politcal rectitude"...
> > >
> > > I recently discovered the Strugatskys whose wonderful later works read
> > > like Kafka on LSD.
> > >
> > > Andrei Bely's "Petersburg" is a masterpiece (Nabokov agrees).
> > >
> > > Am 12.12.2019 um 16:51 schrieb Laura Kelber:
> > > > I agree with all of this, Rich. There are minefields of gratuitous
> > > violence
> > > > and cruelty (it sells!) and dreary political rectitude (the critics
> > > behoove
> > > > themselves to praise it) that scare me away from a lot of current
> > > > literature.
> > > --
> > > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>