IN SNOB CASTLE: Recent Book Reviews, Jan/Feb 2025

Cooper, Szasz, Maurois, Stach, Caudell, etc

IN SNOB CASTLE refers to prior Substack newsletters where I try to review books, from the vantage point of “my snob castle,” my battlements and towers of aesthetic judgment. These book reviews of mine were lifted from Goodreads. I am struggling from stage fright at writing some other bigger higher-profile book reviews, including for The Valeries by Forrest Muelrath which I had complicated feelings about. I should just write it. But I want to reread it. This is taking forever and causing agony. Also want to review The Hotel Egypt by Stuart Ross which I really enjoyed. Inside the Castle’s monstrous AI volume needs to be reviewed. I need to get Gabriel Hart’s On High in Red Tide and read it, along with some other books. I was asked to blurb a couple books, including a cool thriller by Matthew Kinlin, which: more about that later. I don’t know how much I should say about it now, probably very little.

Anyway, here are the book reviews I’ve written lately.

THE SLUTS by Dennis Cooper

This is an upsetting book that for me required taking breaks to catch my breath and give my mind a rest from the horror. It’s extremely graphic and dark-humorous. I didn’t feel good about reading this, except to engage in a kind of nauseating anti-celebration in the recognition of where so many other writers are pulling their ideas from. It’s a case study in unreliable narrators and not being a gullible reader of online text, which any malicious mind-parasite could write for any number of reasons other than to convey information. Belief, credibility, honesty are counter-balanced and undone by fanciful spinning of yarns on a review site for male escorts. The book had a comic running joke aspect which provided levity that was only partially welcome as it had no possible hope of fully beating back the horrible, black fantasies of torture, pedophilia, drug abuse, and murder. Each panel in this set of narrative surfaces was more chilling than the next. It’s for good reason, apparently, that Dennis Cooper is treated as a writer at the extreme outpost of transgressive deep space.

KAFKA: THE DECISIVE YEARS by Reiner Stach

Hard to encapsulate this middle volume of the three-volume definitive biography of Franz Kafka, covering the years 1910-1915. This poor guy was never going to be a conventional, normal person. The majority of the biography is taken up with his ill-starred relationship with Felice Bauer, a young Jewish woman from Berlin who worked for a dictograph manufacturer. Kafka was in Prague. It was an epic long-distance relationship, conducted through letters and telegrams, and it crashed and burned horribly. They were engaged to be married in a hesitant, on-again-off-again pattern that was grueling to read. Kafka seemed to eventually arrive at a place where he knew he had to be married to his writing and not another person. The best parts of this 581-page book were about his literary labors. What it must have been like for biographer Reiner Stach to pore over Kafka’s notebooks and manuscripts and letters which were miraculously preserved throughout history’s turbulent and destructive course. Kafka’s friend Max Brod, the writer and editor, emerges as a major character in the biography: panoramic breadth and depth is given to the literary world of German-speakers that Kafka was something of a mediocre, half-hearted light within, at least as far as publishing his work. When he wrote, he was obsessed. When he arranged to have his work published, he was taciturn and almost indifferent. Funny that the book is called Kafka: The Decisive Years, because it doesn’t seem, at least in the surface, to be Kafka doing any deciding of great consequence; he is more often a kind of neurasthenic victim of circumstance. Other topics of historical interest that Kafka observes in this volume are the phenomenon of Zionism as it developed in Central European thought, and the outbreak of World War One. This book is extremely detail-oriented and recommended. You come to trust the biographer’s insights into the biographical subject who has notoriously seemed to remain a hermetic cipher who barely knew and understood himself. This book is inspiring for those wishing to plumb the depths of one exemplary self who came to awareness in tandem with the influential, tainted “science” of psychoanalysis (Vienna in the early years of the 20th century). Reading Kafka’s diaries translated by Ross Benjamin in dialogue with this biography has been fruitful. I’ve ordered volume three The Years of Insight to continue the reading.

WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence

I started out hating this book for its clipped British dialogue and clumsy philosophizing. It was halting and didn’t really flow until the second half when it made more sense to me. I was able to more fully inhabit the world of the novel and its method of revealing the psychological insights of its characters. It’s a third person omniscient kind of book, for what it’s worth. What a bitter and somewhat pessimistic downbeat ending. And yet it has an expansive set of ideas about men and women and how sexuality plays a strong, subtle role (the two are not opposites) in how people respond. Love is a tedium, a repressed idiotic state of being. I can get behind that! But love is also a rescue. It’s a complicated, worthwhile novel, if a little stilted by the time period and Lawrence’s limitations as a writer. I want to read The Rainbow and everything else by Lawrence now.

INVISIBILITY: A MANIFESTO by Audrey Szasz

This chapbook, or pamphlet, or whatever, at 54 pages serves as a very good and very strong dose of what Audrey Szasz seems to offer, which is shocking, dark, funny, finely constructed writing about sexual exploitation, depersonalization, and extreme antisocial behavior. Don’t bother looking for a reliable narrator because “Audrey Szasz” doesn’t seem to exist fully. And the narrators she compulsively imagines are all waiting with Wile E. Coyote contraptions to annihilate the reader and not even leave a grease-spot in their place. Life is cheap. Punish the gullible. It’s probably me getting sucked into the lethal tractor beam of Audrey Szasz’s Marquis de Sade charisma if I say I’d like to read everything she’s written. If only I could afford to buy it!

ON HASHISH by Walter Benjamin

Curious little book about Walter Benjamin’s experiences with hashish and other drugs. Benjamin was a German philosopher and literary critic who wrote on intellectual history, modernist writers, Marxist interpretations of literature and culture in the 1920s and 30s before killing himself in Spain in 1940 fleeing from the French police (and by extension, the Nazis). He conducted numerous experiments taking hashish and wrote several psychedelic mini-travelogues of his excursions in Marseilles while he was “lifted in the name of hieroglyphics.” It’s fun to read and also illuminating: many vivid images and conceptual observations of how the mind and the five senses work while in an intoxicated trance. The book presents these scattered notes along with other fragmentary material to suggest the outline of a book that never came to be written by Benjamin, on hashish. It’s sad that when he died he had partially planned-out designs for several books which he did not get the chance to fully work out. This book suffers a bit for its incompletion, however carefully the editors supplied endnotes and explanations. You get glimpses of where his mind went but it’s not finished and polished work. Maybe it doesn’t really need to be. It’s a short book, and very absorbing. A little more could have been said to put the raw material into the cultural and political context of interwar Europe. I haven’t read enough Baudelaire to really get the substance of his significance to hashish trances as Benjamin saw them. This would be a logical next step in reading about this issue. The actual logical next step, though, might be to take hashish.

SHAME by Annie Ernaux

Quick read. I should read other books by Ernaux. I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and this didn’t exactly answer that question. It was good but a little slack somehow. A lot about her Catholic childhood and her parents and her hometown. I’m happy I read it, it only took a couple hours.

PSALMIST KAPUT by Cloak

A quite frustrating book. The book evades capture in a teasing, hostile fashion. Graphics and diagrams and what seem like aerial maps interfere with the ability to read strange texts—the words behave like gates imperfectly letting through meaning-units. Never was a book screaming at its reader more about its limitations, as the trim and gutter (the physical dimensions of the book’s visual plane) are cut off into “exclusion zones” making a full reading impossible. This is either accident or by design, either way it withholds itself. The book is like a tracery in a 3D space that begins *just slightly on the far side* of a border between aesthetic craft and pretentious gibberish. The text manages to convey something whimsical at times: an AI trying to crack wise to a teacher’s lounge full of theory professors and programmer’s at their lunch break. Overall, in true meaning, the book serves as a physical indicator marking the moment of disbursement of funds to its publisher/printer Cloak at Amazon, nothing more. And isn’t that the quintessence of book-dom at this moment in time? There’s a profound statement there, but this is not concrete literature to be enjoyed. It’s an avant garde scrying glass that, if looked into too deeply, reveals an empty void framed by the residue of clever book design: a “proof” of concept at the extremity of literacy, text, logo-combinatorial calculation.

HARDLY WORKING by Caleb Caudell

I’ll write more about this book elsewhere but for now I’ll just say it was a massive downer that still managed to radiate kinetic laugh-lines, many arrows in the comedy quiver. I wonder how an audiobook of this would go over. Much of the writing is heavily philosophical about the modern conundrum of the low-paid working stiff making lattes at coffee shops where people with remote “email jobs” congregate and spread out with their tech gear as if they’re managing a NASA mission. It’s hilarious dagger-eyes pointed at the 21st century US economy and all those who don’t deserve designer burgers and other gastronomic wonders, while out in the courtyard two old homeless men pass a fifth of scotch back and forth. We’re doomed, according to Caudell, and it really hurts, but he has to fix his car to get to the next crappy job. This is a voice in the wilderness crying out for justice, and it’s not coming.

PROMETHEUS: THE LIFE OF BALZAC by Andre Maurois

It was a little tiresome, frankly. Heavily focused on Balzac’s debts, his financial mismanagement. I came away from this book with a dislike for the subject and an impatience with the biographer. I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked about the writings of Balzac except that he turned out a ton of books in his short lifetime and was always trying to play beat the clock in a sense. More ink was spilled over his extravagant furniture bills and sums he owed to decorators. Sad that he was only allowed to marry his Ukrainian bride right before his death. The ending, with the death scenes, was the best part of the book, but I don’t know if it’s because it was skillfully and emotionally done or because it signaled the end of this laborious reading experience, and I could finally unclench. Anyway, will not be reading a biography by Andre Maurois anytime soon. Might read Balzac himself again though.

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I was in L’étranger again this morning (USA time) with an excerpt from “Because A Problem Repeatedly Occurred,” my last Substack post. That’s a bit from my recent writing which I’ll shut up about out of fear of jinxing myself too bad.

I’m too lazy to create a link. The way I feel right now, if you really want to hear the show, you can search for L’étranger Radio Panik, or you can visit my Instagram page where the link is in my recent story. Follow me on Instagram. I haven’t listened to the show yet because I’m not in the right frame of mind. I’m sure it will be thrilling and aesthetically/politically upsetting as Kosten Koper’s shows usually are. I’m happy to be featured there.

I read poetry at a live event in person on campus at SUNY Oneonta. Again, the link is on Instagram if you search for it in the post under this photo.

I got off Twitter as my header image says. Fuck Twitter/X. I’m finding more of a congenial home on Substack Notes where there is a lot of intriguing and intelligent commentary and ferment, more than last time I checked months and months ago. I pray that it doesn’t become a garbage heap like Twitter did and like Instagram basically is too. It’s threatening to go downhill. I’m interested in the ways that different social media platforms have, in the words of Stephanie Yue Duhem, different “architectural affordances” (she was talking about the ways that poetry is perceived according to online channels, but I feel like there’s a larger point as social media takes new historical and cultural shapes. It’s intriguing to think of it all in terms of architecture—space and structure and purpose that sometimes leads to unintended or quasi-natural behavior and sedimentation, humans following a flow and an expansion or contraction, the way they might in cities, around blocks of buildings or doorways or voids between concrete shapes. We’re doing that in cyberspace, as well, for better or worse. This is my novice way of understanding it.)