After a bunch of SF, I decided to relax with some doorstopper fantasy. What a disappointment when it turned out that (SPOILER) this so-called "Magic" Mountain didn't have any magic in it!

Dumb jokes aside, this is a great novel. It's also very clearly a modernist fiction of autonomy, so people who purport to know about those maybe should have had something to say about it thirteen years ago. But I just don't have the German, or the sense of the German literary field, to do it right. Offhand, however, it's clear that the Sanatorium Berghof is a way of exploring relative autonomy from historical time. So clear that it's almost parodic, just as the opposition is comically exaggerated between the plodding hyper-steoretypically Hamburg "flatland" life Castorp is escaping and the intellectualized, cosmopolitan, and transgressively erotic (not only heterosexually) realm of the sanatorium. And so too is the lesson about the limits of this autonomy all too clear, not only in the explosive ending but well before. On the last page the garrulous narrator literally tells us the story is "hermetic," "told for its own sake."

Otherwise, I was particularly moved by the tour-de-force snow chapter, and the evocation of listening obsessively to a recording of Schubert. I wonder if Fischer-Dieskau deliberately followed Mann's description of the record Castorp loves so much.

(comment on The Magic Mountain)

After teaching Annilihation once again and finding it improves on re-reading and re-teaching, I decided to go read this late fourth installment of the trilogy. I read Authority and Acceptance ten-ish years ago and remember them only vaguely as somewhat disappointingly un-weird. Perhaps VanderMeer felt the same, since Absolution is aggressively weird. The first half is quite good and recaptures some of that "surrender to the weird" magic of Annihilation. The second half is more one-note, and though I like sweary monologue as much as the next manchild, it got a bit tiring. I did not have a great sense of what was going on, or if the first three volumes were being explained or rewritten or what. Leaning on time travel was a bit disappointing to me.

The climate politics? I think its climate politics is that ecosystems are precious and fragile and domestic spying agencies should be more professionally run? Hard to tell really.

(comment on Absolution)