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May. 24th, 2023 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretWinter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys
I went back to Emrys's earlier work because I liked A Half-Built Garden so much, but I felt a little trepidation because it turns out her earlier novels are Cthulhu Mythos.
Winter Tide has a lot of the same warmth and building unexpected family vibes that I so enjoyed in A Half-Built Garden, but I am not super-into Cthulhu Mythos work and I am fucking tired of The Monsters in Old Horror Represented Minorities, So Therefore Let's Tell a Story about Sympathetic Monsters Who are Metaphors for Minorities. Okay, maybe sometimes it can work but there's this fundamental problem of them still being monsters. One way or another, it concedes something to the bigots that I don't wish to see conceded, and usually that includes ceding more of the moral high ground than I would like.
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Talk about Jews as Monsters. Roth paraphrases the Spider-Man line "With great power comes great responsibility" in this novel as "With great talent comes great responsibility", which is ironic given how great an abuse of talent this novel is. Roth manages stunning moments of language and human dilemma, but he squanders it all in a truly disgusting chapter in which Nathan Zuckerman fantasizes that a young woman he lusts after is actually Anne Frank and that somehow by marrying her (or simply having sex with her) he will absolve himself of his self-hatred.
I went back to Emrys's earlier work because I liked A Half-Built Garden so much, but I felt a little trepidation because it turns out her earlier novels are Cthulhu Mythos.
Winter Tide has a lot of the same warmth and building unexpected family vibes that I so enjoyed in A Half-Built Garden, but I am not super-into Cthulhu Mythos work and I am fucking tired of The Monsters in Old Horror Represented Minorities, So Therefore Let's Tell a Story about Sympathetic Monsters Who are Metaphors for Minorities. Okay, maybe sometimes it can work but there's this fundamental problem of them still being monsters. One way or another, it concedes something to the bigots that I don't wish to see conceded, and usually that includes ceding more of the moral high ground than I would like.
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Talk about Jews as Monsters. Roth paraphrases the Spider-Man line "With great power comes great responsibility" in this novel as "With great talent comes great responsibility", which is ironic given how great an abuse of talent this novel is. Roth manages stunning moments of language and human dilemma, but he squanders it all in a truly disgusting chapter in which Nathan Zuckerman fantasizes that a young woman he lusts after is actually Anne Frank and that somehow by marrying her (or simply having sex with her) he will absolve himself of his self-hatred.