Hello! Every week I’m going to write little reviews of stuff I’ve been reading/playing/etc. It’s in a sort of transitional phase, because I’m still getting my shit together, broadly speaking. And I’m not framing it as “recommendations,” exactly, because a lot of the stuff I like requires a lot of patience, and I don’t have the confidence in myself or knowledge of you to recommend, for example, a one-hundred-hour anime video game. More than once I’ve recommended someone something and they’ve started it and gone “wait, what the hell is this?” Count this as my warning on that front.
Berserk (vol. 1-5) - Kentaro Miura
I haven’t read much manga, really—about half of Akira (which I really liked and need to go back to), Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (which I adored), Osamu Tezuka’s Ayuka (which was a bit much) and Inio Asano’s Downfall (which was not for me, though I’m still curious about some of his earlier stuff). Berserk has been kind of a revelation. It’s taken me a few issues to get into it, but it really is otherworldly; or it feels like the world has been stripped of so much in order to render those dimensions of experience it focuses on—violence and its aftereffects—more luminous and strange. I loved the transition from the Prologue section to the Golden Age arc, even as the first few issues in particular were just massively bruising.
A Perfect Spy – John le Carré
A wild book. I’m probably going to write about it a bit more in this week’s main letter, but I really wound up liking it. It’s slower and more methodical than some of the other stuff of his I’ve read, but the pace really works in its favor; it builds well, and its pivotal moments are quite moving.
It’s an interesting case, politically speaking. Le Carré is obsessed with the personal experience of the political—you wake up one morning, formed by and caught up in a system far, far bigger than yourself, and you realize that this system has manifestly failed to live up to its ideals. Where do you go from there? At the end of the day it strikes me that his work, at least the little of his work I’ve read, is underpinned by a kind of fatalist liberal individualism: the classic lower-c conservative notion that utopian political projects are doomed because it’s people who run them. But it’s also far more sympathetic with the communist project than most art that reflects this worldview, I think—and as a kind of psychological realism, that project is interesting to me if only because a lot of people do experience the world through that lens. England clearly flusters him.
It’s also very exciting. I love that le Carré makes the maybe-traitor at the center of the book his autobiographical stand-in. (His childhood seemed just incredibly bizarre.) It’s a good book about being very hurt by the world. I really liked it.
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