I’ve been reading a lot this summer. I don’t know if it’s because I’m increasingly becoming a curmudgeon (being more comfortable with that title, perhaps) or if I’m just lucky in selecting books that have pissed me off.
I started reading Lydia Davis and I was amused by some of her very short stories at first. Then it became an endurance test. While showering this morning, I decided her writing, at least in Varieties of Disturbance, is like performance art. You are pulled in for the first few minutes and by the time the piece has run its course you are just annoyed. You don’t care if the artist has a vision and you beat a hasty retreat to another section of the museum or gallery.
I really felt like some of her pieces are how it must be for creative writing professors to read class assignments. Smartypants students writing on a theme and using their brilliance to shine a light on one trope (key words: smartypants, brilliance, trope, boring). The title story is a circular piece about the variety of disturbance each member of a family felt when an adult son offered to help elderly parents. By the time I got to the third paragraph about who was more disturbed, I decided NO ONE could be more disturbed than I was and I tossed the book on the table. Today I tossed the book onto the book return cart at the library. The next book had better not vex me.
The book I read before the annoyance was riveting and disturbing on an entirely different level. In the Garden of Beasts is the story of Ambassador Dodd and his family in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. I read the book using the Kindle app and I had a short loan period from the library. When I first loaded the e-book, I was worried the loan period wasn’t long enough, but I don’t think there was a way for me to read the book any faster. Larson has a way of hooking you immediately and not letting up until the story runs out. I can’t say that I was a fan of any of the characters (characters is the wrong word since this book is non-fiction) and I actually found myself sympathizing with one Nazi. Good grief. I never thought those words would ever come out of my mouth–read the book and tell me how you feel about Rudolf Diels. A moderate man amongst the beasts.