The Beginning of Fall Programming
Tonight, myself and my lovely spouse are extra excited for the beginning of all of our favourite programming on TV. But what’s got her really excited? Food Network’s Halloween shows! All of that gooey and gory baking is the perfect gear up for the spooky season — which is just around the corner. Where has the time gone? Why are the leaves already so electric on the trees? How are we close to the end of September?
Part of why time has gone so quickly is because of stress, but a week off really has helped us take a breather and some of the urgent tasks have passed. So I’m hoping spooky season will mean a better season in this house.
Another Double Feature of Favourites
Didion had a double feature last week and this week I am reviewing two books by another of my favourite writers Emmanuel Carrère. I first read his book, Yoga, and honestly? I did not like it. And I still do not find myself drawn to his memoir or autobiographical work. But I am glad that I gave his fiction and true crime a chance.
As a writer with a journalistic eye, he really has a gift for detailing events and analyzing facts that keep the reader engaged without boring them or going too far into minutiae. As for his fiction, I find that he uses this same judicious amount of description to maintain the perfect pace and keep the narrative eerie, compelling, and with a degree of starkness that is stylistically breathtaking.
The Adversary
The Adversary is Carrère’s true crime masterpiece and it follows the Jean-Claude Romand case. In 1993, Romand killed his wife and children as well as his parents. Why? Because his entire life as they knew it was a lie. He wasn’t a doctor, had never graduated university, and did not have any kind of employment. He was a con artist whose victims were his close friends and family. Carrère unpacks his lies, and examines his possible motivations and what Romand believes and doesn’t believe about his innocence, sanity, and culpability.
Carrère does share a correspondence with Romand, but for the most part leaves his own life out of it apart from a few mentions and the gathered opinions of friends and family. It puts him in the narrative but also outside of it. The goal is to maintain objectivity and let the reader judge for themselves what happened and why. And what kind of punishment is fitting for this kind of heinous, ego-driven crime.
Class Trip, The Mustache
Class Trip and The Mustache are both shorter novels that are hard to categorize. At their core, they share similar themes of alienation, isolation, lies versus truth, and where delusion connects with reality. Both feature seemingly ordinary situations that quickly turn into horrific sequences of events.
In Class Trip, a young boy is left on a ski retreat with his class, only to realize his father failed to leave him his suitcase. Imaginative storytelling soon leads to real consequences as the reader begins to see just what the young boy’s father has to hide.
In The Mustache, a man shaves off his mustache only for no one to acknowledge that he ever had a mustache at all. What unfolds in the novel is a deep-dive into paranoia as the protagonist begins to suspect everything and everyone around him, which ends in a violent and bloody climax.
A Quarter Pounder with Cheese
The cats had a few free-range eating days while we were forced to take an overnight trip and spend some full days outside of the house. I am very happy that Wesker’s weight has remained stable. I am less happy that Jabberwocky managed to gain 140g, which is basically a quarter of a pound. So now we’ve been calling her ‘Quarter Pounder with Cheese’, and while we’re both laughing, I have some very real concerns. Her annual vet appointment is next week and I think everyone is going to be quite disappointed.