What I read in April + sun
Last year I discovered Proust. It's really one of those things: everyone tells you you have to read Proust, but you don't, until one day you do and when you do you ask "why did no one ever tell me?". This month I finished In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated into English by James Grieve. It reminded me of my own early teen summers, which were obviously nothing like that but that's Proust, baby.
I also read two of Alan Pauls' three "novelas de época", in their and my native Spanish: Historia del llanto and Historia del pelo. The former ominous and endearing, the latter funny and, I found, particularly Argentinian; both written in the style of spiral sentences Spanish lends itself for so well. I'll tackle the last of the three novels, Historia del dinero, when I'm back from Uruguay.
Lastly, today I finished Koljós (Kolkhoze, in the original French edition), by Emmanuel Carrère. I liked it because I would be hard pressed not to like any book containing both of my two biggest literary weaknesses (dead mother, obsessive remembering), but I felt that it meandered far off its natural course and I learnt that Carrère probably isn't to be taken super seriously when talking about capital-I Issues.
All these four books have a certain whiny-man-ness in common which I do not hate but have had enough of for a bit, so I'll try to read other things in May.
We don't get a lot of sun in the apartment. Only one particular corner gets direct sunlight, and only for a couple hours in the morning, but it looks very nice as it does. I've been trying to clear the corner so that Tepo can lay there during the sunny hour and enjoy it but he was uninterested, as it's not a very interesting corner of the apartment, far from where we (people) usually are. I finally convinced him by laying down the infallible cat trap: a Random Square on the Floor. As the reader may know, cats love sitting on random squares on the floor. Like this:
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