(no subject)

[muckefuck]

Yesterday between loads (of laundry, you filthy scamps!) I finished the Elorriaga. Turns out it's not short fiction in the way I expected but essentially four novelas woven together--although he doesn't make explicit what he's doing until the final four chapters, where each of the separate stories lines (although three of them centring on members of the same extended family and one on a family friend) achieves resolution. It's maybe too neat and the conclusion of the leading narrative is predictable, but he won a lot of goodwill from me by eschewing sentimentality with his adolescent protagonists. Also, two of the narratives involve a Basque/Welsh axis of cooperation that played completely to my psychlims.

I still intend to read the book on the Chouteaus, though I haven't made much progress yet. Yesterday, looking for some compatible fiction reading, I dug out Olivier and Parrot in America, Peter Carey's tongue-in-cheek take on de Tocqueville. I tried it last year and didn't get grabbed, so I skipped to the introduction of Parrot and then went back to the beginning, so I think I'm in it this time. As I was telling the Old Man, despite the arrival of summery mugginess over the weekend, it's just not oppressive enough outside for me to start reading Faulkner.