Murder, poetry, androgyny — are we sure this isn’t a Tocarczuk production?

I understand that I am prime pretentious-meta-english-major target audience, but I am so confused and bummed out by just how poorly this book has been received. What exactly is wrong with a little literary labor? I don’t even think the text is that abstruse, all things considered, and certainly the depth of the content is well worth the effort it takes to look up a few artist names on Google.

Consider: most all our answers, our themes: already fully realized in the title. Death Takes Me. Yes, death comes for us. It seeks, it claims, it collects. The title is therefore declaration of fate, threat of capture. But “takes” has still more lurid undertones than this — one can “take” and be “taken” in marriage, one can “take” and be “taken” outside of it. So the title is then perhaps a bit of exhibitionism, an invitation to the macabre voyeur — watch as “Death Takes Me.” Or perhaps a sadder admission, a violation acknowledged. Death strips us naked, robs us of our dignity, our purity. And it is not content with our mere sex, as there is still another sense of “takes:” that of requirement. So we read that death demands us, not just our body but our selfhood. We are consumed by it, drawn out by it. Death is the equalizer and the revelation that we never really know anyone at all.

And so we have our themes, in three takes on “takes:” fate, desire, self. And we can imagine further permutations — fate frustrating desire, desire consuming self, self foreswearing fate. And we can ask, then, ”i want to talk to you. may i?” (passion is no hard proof of fate). And we can ask ”Who is killing me? To whom am I giving myself over to be killed?” (flesh of my flesh, anyone who reads me and shapes me for themselves). And we can ask ”Who’s speaking? Who the hell is speaking?” (it has been me, let it not be much longer).

Let it not be any longer. I encourage you to challenge yourself to this novel, but have assembled a brief guide below which, reading through as straightforwardly as possible, I hope should give you some thematic footholds for your reading:

p.37 … do you see how one goes on “wasting the gifts of the body?”

p.23 … in some part of his head or desire he conceived of me or produced me as a woman that, being me, was really another person.

p.17 — words that, in that moment, lacked all innocence

p.45 … demanding a categorical conclusion…

p.29 The absence (of an answer)——outrageous.

p.43 It’s difficult to understand what you do. Difficult to explain. Above all, this: it’s difficult to explain.

p.46 ”Writers write… above all, fundamentally, about what they do not know about the world and about themselves.”

p.112 He’s someone who wants to look inside.

p.36 … the poem’s task is not to communicate but quite the opposite: to protect the secret place that resists all communication, all transmission, every effort of translation…

p.64 Those who analyze, murder… / Those who read carefully, dismember. / We all kill.

p.120 with the from-afar-ness that you impose, even from this closeness, on everything around you…

p.106 the absent eye deforms and transforms what the faithful witness gathers, the present eye.

p.82 You have to let the danger aim at you… to place yourself in the target of the now.

p.91 … the violence of the knowledge of death.

p.139 To write, from this perspective, amounts to inscribing a sign on the surface of a dismembered body…

p.60, p.219 And what could be more deserving of preservation than desire?”

p.120 Total recognition. You are me: I am you.

p.158 … the same problem as always: “How dare I write in a language I do not know?”

p.176 ”The things you’ll do,” the old man would mutter, “to refuse abandonment. To turn it into something else.”

p.190 What have we done with the gifts of sex?

p.230 ”Accept this face of mine, mute and betting… Accept this love I ask for. Accept the part of me that is you…”

Truly, earnestly awful. I’ve never been less surprised to find out that a book was written by a software engineer.

I am continually horrified by the steadily increasing number of novels which claim to cater to adults but have clearly been written at a 6th grade level. The prose in PHM is hard to bear in general, but at its worst when attempting emotion or humor (for an example of the latter, consider the joke about sleep pulled verbatim from tumblr on page 205). There are times when the narrative gets emotional, but only in the way Bing-Bong being left behind in Inside Out was emotional (and even then it is no match for Pixar in presentation). Teaching kids does not mean you have to write like one. This is an AP Chemistry (or whatever, insert the most relevant science class here) word problem stretched out to 500 pages. The only upside is the letters are large and the type is wide, presumably because PHM is more interested in looking like a novel than actually being one. Boo. End review.

“Absalom, Absalom!”

So it repeats, and so it repeats. Face imposed upon face and shade and half-self, half blood self, circling around that one central mistake, that one central Tolstoy where-did-I-go-wrong, or was it here? Was it the boy denied entry at the door, or the boy denied father entry at the door? So many sins to absolve, so many fathers and brothers and sisters to kill and to wed to kill as one self overwritten with one self flesh on flesh probably tearing the king the brother father sister mother house apart.

A heavy read, typical of Faulkner. Mentally and emotionally exhausting, and very probably twice as arduous to write as to read, making it an even more admirable effort. Insane to write something like this and still be pretty racist — not that there isn’t a lot of racist stuff in this novel, but the central ideas seem to (and often explicitly) dismantle the very social and psychological foundations of racism. Seems to be part and parcel of Faulkner, though. A darkness he can’t quite seem to penetrate, though everywhere hints of its coming dissolution.