tob 3/24 Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez /fvr/

March 24  Tues.
qrtr finals  after this only the four winners of this (go into semifinals) and potentially two more books (as zombies, unless out-zombied by the semi-final losing bks) remain in contention: ie narrowed down to four - six books.

March 24 Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez judges   //and becomes fvr to me, along w Victor LaValle//
Redeployment v. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay


re Ferrante...

Vazquez:
Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. It’s the third book in her Neapolitan trilogy and I hadn’t read the first two so it took a few chapters of flipping to the index to see who was who and what was what before I had my bearings.  once I caught my stride I was hooked. She writes with an intensely sensitive attention to emotional detail, an unforgiving honesty about class, and a masterful knack for weaving the political seamlessly with the personal.
The overarching story centers around a post-World War II ghetto of Naples—not sure where exactly, Ferrante seems to only refer to it as “the neighborhood“—over the course of roughly half a century. It follows the narrator Elena, who leaves—kind of: She goes off to school in Pisa, publishes a book, gets engaged, and in this book returns to stay with her family before moving to Florence with her fiancé—and Raffaela, usually referred to as Lina or Lila, who stays—kind of: She marries the grocery store manager, leaves him for another dude, and when that dude knocks up this other chick she leaves him to go live with this other dude in the suburbs of Naples, which is where we find her in this book. Regardless, the point more or less is that Elena’s on this sort of aspirational, upward trajectory, mingling in academic and literary circles, while Lila stays local, works at the grocery store and then at a sausage factory, and they’re both swept up, somewhat reluctantly, into the communist/anti-fascist student movement of the time, Elena as an intellectual and Lila as a worker.
But the book resists and at times dissolves the shorthand I just employed to try to sum it up. You can’t clearly say that Elena is squarely an intellectual and Lila is squarely a worker. They’re close friends who both come from poverty and both possess intellect and both perform labor of sorts, and in the minutiae of their relationship you see how these larger ideas play out on a human level, all through the organically feminist lens of the deep spiritual connection between these two women who, in two distinctly different ways, are seeking freedom from the strictures of society as a whole, from the expectations (and lack thereof) of their neighborhood and the pressures of various men and women in their lives that insist they behave this or that way. It's a real constellational soap opera of ideas.

-teedle: the interior lives and relationships of two women living during the anti-fascist labor movements in Naples during the 60s

-Felicity:   I am so happy! I thought the Ferrante would get bounced out early because of it being the third book, but I should have trusted its quality to shine through anyway. I read all three in such a rush it's a little hard for me to separate out where the second one ends and the third one begins. This is definitely my favorite book left in the tournament and now I have some hope it will go all the way!  
I particularly can't wait for it to face An Untamed State, though I may have a total meltdown if it loses. I actually think both books take on very similar settings and issues (at least if you think AUS is trying to say something broader about Haiti and the effects of extreme poverty and class issues) -- worlds of abject poverty where violence is woven deeply into the fabric of life and what happens when people "escape" those worlds, if they ever do, and especially what happens to women trapped in those worlds and trying to get out, and how class and violence acts on women in those circumstances. I just think Ferrante does all that incredibly well, and Gay falls short.
Ferrante's prose is deliberately straightforward and sometimes brutal but it is never cliched or trite or clunky, which I thought Gay's writing often was.    Similarly -- or perhaps because she is such a good writer on a sentence level -- her setting was so alive and encompassing and real. Her characters are all unique and three-dimensional, even the ones we barely see in this volume -- the book both manages to be a very personal, particular story about two women and to show how those women are impacted by the world they live in at every moment.
-Melanie G: I didn't know Miri as intensely as I know Elena & Lila, but then again, has there been a fictional woman anyone has ever known as intensely as we were allowed to know those two?
I like how Gay uses Miri's prickliness to keep us at the same painful distance she forces upon the rest of the world. I would want to hug her and make it all better, but that's as misguided as anything Michael does or says.
I think Elena wants to hug Lila the same way, sometimes. But she knows not to, and the tension of loving a friend but being not who that friend needs in a time of need is gorgeously visceral on Ferrante's pages.
-Felicity: Has anyone ever written about female friendship as intensely or well as these books?
-Melanie: I fear I am ruined for any other book about female friendship now. The Ferrante is just too good, and I will spend my reading time mourning that I'm not reading her.   IT'S SO GOOD.   ...Ferrante's writing on female sexuality, sex in marriage, the body in pregnancy, the developing teen-girl awareness of her body as an object and as a weapon and as a tool and as a curse.     
Every time I see a 'maybe she's really a man' comment about Ferrante ...  I have never seen a writer take a character from girlhood to womanhood so throughly within her skin as Ferrante does with Elena. Elena's truths /re specifically female experience? ^ pregnancy/  are too true, and too intimate and way too interior, to come from someone who has not lived them.
-Felicity: When I first read that (the speculation she's really a man) I had to stop and sort of look around, blinking slowly, wondering if these people had read her books or ever met a woman, or if I was maybe the crazy one? And then I just started laughing. Of course some dudes think that only a man could possibly write the most intimate, true portrait of womanhood that I have ever read. (EVER.) I don't think it's impossible for people to write characters of the opposite gender really, really well -- but certain insights and experiences in these books I don't think could ever be imagined by someone who did not live through some version of them /and cld only live thru as as a female? ~ I don't ~ underst ~ difference (gender ~ //
-Melanie G:  EVER.

-amy: a story about female friendship over many years is all too unusual.

 -llj: I have not seen mention of Ferrante's own story: her anonymity.   .-Plenty of rumors abound already about her identity, including this one mentioned in The Guardian: "In Italy, there is a rumour that her work might actually be the product of the (male) avant-garde novelist Domenico Starnone." (hah.) I must say it adds to the intrigue for me, cannot wait to get started.

-ekdumas: Someone had to fall today and I'm sort of glad it wasn't the awesome Neapolitan ladies. Overtime and as I muse on the Ferrantes, I like them more and more.  -aliceunderskies: yes, Ferrante is such a grower! I wasn't sure at first about her but the characters have taken lo bkng term hold on my mind. It's unusual for me. And hurrah for passionate judgments.
-Totally! When does that fourth book come out again?!   -Sept
-karen hecht brown: I heard the US publication date was pushed back to November.
-karen hecht brown: Ferrante finally agreed to an in-person* interview with The Paris Review (friends with the interviewer?) You can find it on line.  <<<<< * Still referred to by her pen name of Elena Ferrante. 


-elliott holt: Yes, read them in order. I can't get enough of Ferrante's fierceness. I tore through all three Neopolitan novels and can't wait for the fourth to be published in English!

-mrhilary: I’m glad to see Ferrante move on, though, because as far as my reason to pick up novels goes –to find joy– you’d be hard-pressed to find something more immersive than these books, wh you should absolutely start from the beginning.


-Sean Carman I'm near the end of the second Ferrante and I can't recommend the series highly enough. In their headlong style, sensitive attention to emotional detail (as Vazquez says), vivid & intensely dramatic scenes, and storylines that (again quoting Vazquez) perfectly blend the personal and political, they are nothing less than contemporary classics. I've been rooting for "Those Who Leave" the whole tournament and have my fingers crossed for it in the next two rounds. Start at the beginning. You'll blaze through them.
-The TWLaTWS could probably work on its own but I had such an emotional investment after reading the first two, it increased the power of #3 tenfold. I don't know how I'll wait until Sept. to find out how it ends.
-aliceunderskies: Yes, yes, yes. It speaks to Ferrante's skill that the third book stands on its own, but I think a great deal of profundity on friendship and what it means to grow older would be lost if you miss Lila and Elena as children.
-mrhilary: Yes and also yes: it'd be like making a friend and then cutting them off every time they try to tell a story about their life pre-age 30.


Chico McDirk • 13 hours ago     -Why does the Ferrante cover look like a new-age parenting manual?
//thread re edtns UK, Austr, Norway .. also Knausgaard.  /wh I just checked y all appear be transl by Don Bartlett.  so I want the archipelago, don't I? ~ the fsg is alright




~~~~~  Redployment
re war......

-Barniclaw: Very happy to see Ferrante pull through.
I've read a bit of war fiction--Matterhorn is one of my favorites--and I really didn't get the love for Redeployment. Subject matter aside, I didn't find the writing itself to be compelling or rich or even interesting. There are better books out there that don't romanticize, glorify, or legitimize war--on any level.


 -jimMcc: I'm anti-war in general and viciously anti-this war, and I believed Redeployment to be a stunning collection. It engages the reader on a personal and humane level while not shying away from the incredible cruelty of soldiers at war or even the intense ambivalence many of those soldiers feel. It is, I would argue, much more morally sound and ultimately liberal than Vazquez seems to give it credit for.

-OutLikeALamb JimMcC • 5 hours ago   With you all the way. Vazquez has the right to feel and say whatever he wants, and it does make for a fiery judgment. But, his argument strikes me as super privileged: being opposed to U.S. conflict by definition and therefore refusing to engage with any artistic iteration of it. He even laid out that the few people he knows in the military are so "fundamentally different," politically and I suspect Vazquez means in a lot of other ways too. Maybe they are! Tons of others aren't! Who cares!! If you don't engage with a huge part of what's become our culture, your understanding and credibility are pretty limited. I'm sincerely anti-war too, but it's not going to hurt the human fabric if I at least understand a little bit of what veterans' lives are like. As people. Not as machines of the U.S. military, but as people. We read all kinds of things, fiction and non, th we don't endorse, and I think it's a cop out to write off this collection as a political statement. And by the way, I found Redeployment pretty liberal too, but maybe that's just confirmation bias.    //wow ok well said, to me.  to put alongside Vazquez's jdgmnt wh also had force for me.



-teedle  (to Drew thread) • 18 hours ago: 1) Take your time, it's worth it. [re ferrante]
2) I'm aware that Redeployment and other Iraq-war lit aren't "Pro-war" (and who is, really), but the unwillingness or reluctance to look at the other side of this war is troubling. I'm much more interested in Elliot Ackerman's new book, Green on Blue.       I don't have a problem in general with war-lit. But I avoided Redeployment because I'm just not interested in hearing THIS war told through the eyes of the occupier (and I'm aware that individual soldiers aren't to be blamed for the situation, etc.) AGAIN when the war is still going on, Iraq is worse than it was pre-invasion, and 1000s are still dying.
-marinus: Do I want to read more of an Iraqi perspective on war—sure. But I don't think most of us here in America have a handle on our role as occupiers, or what putting young people in the position of being occupiers does to them. To say that this perspective has been told enough seems way too simplistic, when the truth is we can barely stand to hear the stories told, much less to see our ourselves reflected in them.  Put another way, how will we be able to hear the stories of anyone else if we can't understand ourselves?  // ~ eh this sounds so generally like wh ppl say, feels like not saying anyth //
-teedle:  We can't understand "ourselves" without hearing the stories of "anyone else." That's largely the point of fiction.   /dig that.  
-marinus: It's not a zero sum game. At all. I want the Iraqi fiction too. I'm just not asking this book to be that book. /fair enough

-caroline pruett: The idea that just because a lot of books have been written on a topic, an individual reader is ready to move on ...
-teedle: Who is the straw man making that argument?    // :)


-gillieronfresco: I'm curious to read Vasquez's novel because he seems to be unwilling to place himself somewhere unsafe. Fiction can enlighten, it is supposed to put us in places we might not go. That includes places we might not want to go       .. -I like the man too, he's pushing boundaries all over the place

-teedle: Judging from the publishing industry "Places you might not want to go" would include the lives and relationships of women. There are more war novels published than books like Those Who Leave.
&
-teedle: I think that's quite a misreading of his judgment here, but I doubt I'm going to convince you of that. I don't think he's afraid to go to dark places, just tired of hearing from the side of occupier, and not the occupied. You disagree, and that's cool.




-peer s: Good morning, my name is Peer and I am German. Im not particulary fond of war novels and for all the reasons you might think off. Everything i can write about WW2 would come short about my feelings about it. So , that was that.
Having said that I do think US-americans are imho more obsessed with war stories than Europeans. Perhaps its because you dont live on old battlefields.

-caroline: Respectfully, we definitely live on old battlefields.
-n73: Only in the South. Outside of Gettysburg, it's just not part of the North. // xx
--marinus: quite a few revolutionary war sites up here in New England...
--caroline: Swathes of the West might beg to differ. But 'only certain regions of the country think about the old battlefields that many of us live on' is not quite the same.
--vanessa: Yeah I would argue that "old battlefields" describes the entire country, since our nation was carved out of land we killed people to get.











-Ryan Ries: For me this was the best judgment of the tourney, though I can't stand the political soapboxing, vehemently disagree with the implication that war writing as a genre is unnecessary because we all know how bad war is, and find the judge's bio to be aggressively pretentious. But the judgment is honest, passionate, singular, subjective, controversial. A breath of fresh air compared to most of the other judgments this year.

two days ago, -Ryan Ries:   I am amazed at all the clamoring this year for "objective" judgments. This year's judgments have been dull, frankly, like assignments for some high school Comp class written by folks aiming not necessarily for the truth but for the best grade.
Here's the formula:
1. "Sandwich technique" Book A (Plaudit-->minor criticism-->plaudit)   2. "Sandwich technique" Book B (Plaudit-->minor criticism-->plaudit)  3. Find unifying theme to tie A & B together  4. Praise A & B again     5. Pick winner and praise again.
Also, humans are not objective. Which is part of the reason humans are so fascinating that people have written billions of words about them over the centuries.    Please, judges: more subjectivity. More personality. Please.

-cdhermelin:this is my favorite judgment so far. It's actually kind of like yesterday's [Annihilation v An Untamed State: judge said she usually d n like scifi] he put his bias right up front. Only I knew, unlike yesterday, that his bias would keep the book from advancing. [y yesterday seemed like a set-up for surprise-twist judgement but then not.]
yesterday -cdhermelin: actually, I even thought it meant the book was getting one of those hero edits that you see on reality tv -- you never thought this one would make it, but wow! -- that sort of thing.

 Neighbors73 Drew • 16 hours ago  Drew. I love you man. But in a few weeks, go back and read yesterday. I personally feel sort of yucky about it.  And if you went in and substituted "war fiction" into the thread yesterday, and SFF everywhere you see war stories today, you'd see how ridiculous it all is. We vigorously defend what we love, and skip what we don't. We all do that. Yesterday was weird. But let's not carry it over into today.  9 • Reply • Share ›     
aliceunderskies Drew • 16 hours ago  I say this out of fondness, because I often wish in retrospect that someone had said it to me: you're being paranoid and combative. Why do you think you are one of everyone's "primary targets," today and yesterday? That's silly. I gasped and cackled when I realized what form the judgment was taking and how it is like an answer to so many of yesterday's conversations. "This is my chance to show Drew!" didn't even cross my mind, and probably not Ryan's either. Just like yesterday, there are no personal attacks until there are personal attacks.





mcass gml EvthAllth
disqus_WNYzX1OQfj

//logged in via ggl > disqus, so as to reply to kellie re Meditations in Green.  bcs no one had, and sounds excellent fr dailybeast 1982 Amer Dreams writeup I read.//







tmn tob 3/24                                                [  & 3/19 Ferrante    < not copied here        ((phone notepad notes


3/24 Ferrante  v Klay

/ well   I am about to copy whole judgemnt re Ferrante.  good sum, well writ smart {the dashed "who leaves, kind of --"  and   "who stays, kind of--"}  I like this guy Victor Vazquez's boldness.
so copy to dlww/
"Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is basically a flawless piece of literature and the clear winner."


nice.  so now:
Semifinals
March 25           judge  Laura Cogan
A Brief History of Seven Killings Jms
v. The Paying Guests   Waters
March 26            J Courtney Sullivan
An Untamed State       Gay
v. TBD  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay     Ferrante

good good!   want BriefSeven Marlon James to win & think shld. and prob will.
    want Ferrante to win .. feel more dubious th will.       prob?  being judged by a writer, and it is the better writ novel? *

might any of those four, if lose, have more zombie votes than
Station 11 &  ATLWCS  -  I dunno, prob not?  maybe UAS? ~ bcs passionate readers?
prvs matches: Paying Guests won over ATLWCS. .and.  UAS won once over Station 11.
//ah so if either or both of those win in semifinals (I'd guess & prefer not) then wld swap to avoid repeat match: so wld be Paying Guests v Station 11. 
and(or) UAS v ATLWCS. 

these are now the six in play.  contenders.

Brief Hist Seven Killings.    Ferrante.
Paying Guests.     An Untamed State.
Station 11.     ATLWCS.




I'd like Brief Hist Seven Killings James v Ferrante for chmpnship!
(or James v UAS, also int, and there Jms ~shld win   bcs also lot of important  and better work of art)

if zombie in chmpnshp, way prefer Station 11 over  ATLWCS (eh).  in zombie round hmm I imagine Jms advancing over either but Ferrante maybe neither.




 */ m discssn yesterday 260+ cmmts   UAS v  Annihilatn    
re importance of subj in UAS whether makes ok th not appear well writ  
(along w sepr discusn dismissing sci fi or fantasy or any genre  or for content-subj)