Long nights

I'm not sure why I've stalled on Wolf Hall. Sure, I lost some momentum by leaving it in Chicago over Christmas, but I figured I'd swiftly get back up to speed again. Part of the issue is that I'd gotten accustomed to reading it during my commute, and I've hardly been spending any time on the shuttle of late. I'm still committed to finishing it--as it is, I'm ranking it as perhaps the best novel I cracked open in 2014--it just might take a little longer than expected.

In the meantime, I've been plugging the gap with shorter fiction. Since I figured I wouldn't have much time to read during the trip (and I was right), I took down some of McCall-Smith's von Igelfeld Entertainments. Nuphy gifted me with Portuguese Irregular Verbs some time back and I loved it, but as I started The finer points of sausage dogs, I realised that I'd read at least the first two stories before. After a couple more, I found myself reaching the point of diminishing returns; the stories began to seem too twee and irritatingly picaresque, and I was happy to be done with them.

After Fun Home reawakened me to the unique possibilities of graphic storytelling, I perused several recent "Best Of" lists to see what I've been missing out on. I ended up adding to my wishlist Harvey Pekar's Our cancer year for relevance and David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp on account of its thoroughly positive reviews. bunj presented me with the first of these on my return to Chicago, but I had to buy the second myself. Both focus on a man-woman relationship in the contemporary United States, but apart from that they differ in about every imaginable way.

Mazzuchelli's storytelling style isn't as dense as Bechdel's, but like her he fully exploits the potential of the medium. One bravura sequence consists of a montage of tiny intimate observations of the eponymous protagonist's absent partner which come flooding back into his memory one morning as he examines a blister on his foot. References, both visual and verbal, to philosophy, mythology, ontology, and the arts are sprinkled liberally throughout. Dreams and dreamlike sequences are interspersed among hyperreal vignettes, Polyp's courtship of the love of his life and his post-divorce mid-life crisis are narrated in parallel, and what explicit narration there is is delivered by his unborn twin.

By contrast, Pekar's autobiographical story is told strictly linearly with minimal artifice. There are some digressions into politics, chiefly on account of his wife's (and co-author's) involvement in the international peace movement, but all the rest is as kitchen sink as it gets. Where Mazzuchelli's art is stunning in its elegance and variety, Frank Stack's jerky linework and messy inking are uniformly ugly. The only real appeal is the honesty and thoroughness with which Pekar and Brabner tell the story of his battle with lymphoma. I read Polyp in less than 24 hours, breaking only for sleep. I'm still only about halfway through Cancer year.

My other distraction are short stories. I'm particularly taken with the Best European Fiction anthology edited by local light Aleksander Hemon. The 2012 edition was on sale cheap at a friend's bookstore and it's making me want to read all the others. Just last night I read a story by Janusz Rudnicki which prompted me to reread the Bruno Schulz stories he references. I'm going to be keeping an eye peeled for books by most of the others, perhaps ordering some of their collections in the original languages if I can find them at reasonable prices.