Backlog

Have finished reading the House of Mirth. Deceptive title, I experienced no mirth and was so very disappointed with the ending. Literature of punishment. Lily  - a frivolous girl, not rich enough for her crowd, gradually punished. Shame hovers over her and kills her. She allows a friend's husband to invest some money for her. He tricks her and just gives her money, then has 'expectations'. At times felt like reading a bodice ripper of a bestseller - shallow intrigue and obsession with status, mean women, and alien like men. I liked the spinster 'do-gooder' Gerty living in a low ceilinged flat and doing good works. She was resigned to a 'dull face - dull fate'. In comparison with Lily not such a bad deal. The setting is turn of the century New York, Monaco, Nice and the Hamptons.

Deborah Eisenberg - Twilight of the Superheroes

published  2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Short story collection. Like poetry. Sombre and wistful in tone. Unpredictable and rich. People observed with zen like calmness. Hospitals, apartments, log cabins, siblings, partners, children; small and grown...Big events (9/11, gun sales) are held back on the periphery of the writing. Set in New York city and semi rural towns fringed with forests. Will be re-reading and reading others by her. 

"In any case, at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost..." p.60 Some Other, Better Otto